Access to Stock Markets Impact on SMEs Performance

This paper attempts to examine the listing impact on small and medium enterprises (SMEs) financial performance. Thus, the analysis compares listed with unlisted European SMEs through various metrics such as Solvency, Liquidity, Profit Margin, Return on Asset/ROA, and Return on Equity/ROE over a period of 10 years (from 2014 to 2023). The RStudio program was used to perform an unpaired student t-test to determine the statistically significant difference between the selected performance indicators for both SMEs group. We found that listing has significantly improved SMEs’ ability to meet short and long-term liabilities (Solvency and Liquidity) while profitability (Profit Margin, ROA and ROE) has notably deteriorated.