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articipants in the 13th Asia-Europe Business Forum (AEBF) paid particular attention to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) during the two-day meeting that ended on Monday.

Held back-to-back with the ninth Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit in the capital of Laos, the forum recommended, among other things, the need to establish specific credit guarantee funds with financial and technical assistance from international development banks.

The recommendation, together with others — to be delivered to the heads of states and governments attending the ASEM Summit — was made to support SMEs with promising activities but insufficient collateral, constituting the SME lending gap, according to AEBF chairman Kissana Vongsay.

“Particular attention should be paid to the problems and needs of SMEs, especially financing in a fast-changing world,” Vongsay, who is also president of the Lao National Chamber of Commerce and Industry, told the forum on Monday.

The same notion was expressed by Guy Apovy, president of the European Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Laos, who said that SMEs were the most suited to development in niche markets, bringing sound competitiveness as well as specificity to emerging markets.

“They can melt easily into the local business landscape,” said Apovy, who is also co-chair of AEBF.

Despite being the real backbone of the economy, he said, SMEs had suffered a lack of autonomy due to scarce resources, poor information or inadequate financing needed to tackle remote markets.

“Most SMEs do not have the autonomy or the possibility of knowing that they are needed by the markets. So their access to information needs to be increased,” he told The Jakarta Post on the sidelines of the forum.

The forum, Apovy said, proposed the public and private sectors to join efforts to provide necessary legal and market information on attractive SME marketing packages to attract those SMEs eager to expand in developing markets in sectors where their expertise was needed.

In this case, according to him, the role of the European business chamber as a vector of development of trade between the two regions was key in the facilitation process.

“I’m really looking forward to hearing in the next AEBF stories about SMEs venturing in emerging countries with real prospects for growth. It would be a nice development from this forum.”

The next AEBF is scheduled for 2014 in Brussels.

Apovy added that SME issues came up in almost every group during the forum’s breakout sessions, indicating the level of importance of the issues among the participants.

Other issues highlighted during the forum included the need for a stable political, social and economic environment, where obstacles to trade in goods and services as well as investment are removed. The best framework for this was provided by the multilateral trade regime, according to the forum.

“Business leaders regret the continuing deadlock in the WTO [World Trade Organization] Doha negotiations and urge all governments to resist protectionism,” Vongsay said, adding that business leaders at the forum understood the importance of sustainable development and protecting the environment.