This report shares ADB's work on designing an empirically rigorous Small and Medium-Sized Enterprise Development Index to measure finance and nonfinance dimensions of micro, small, and medium-sized enterprise (MSME) development.


This final volume of the Asia Small and Medium-Sized Enterprise Monitor 2020 sets out ADB's work so far on the index to help guide support for MSME development. The index aims to capture the structural problems MSMEs face and to measure MSME development and access to finance using multivariate analysis of national MSME data. This note includes the results of index testing using data from Southeast Asia. It does not intend to present a complete index at this stage, but rather raises issues on feasible design of the index through the pilot exercise.