Introduction
Myanmar has gone through a triple transition:
first, from authoritarian military system to democratic governance,
second, from a centrally directed, closed economy to a
market-oriented and an open one and third, from 60 years of
conflict to peace in the border areas. The country has emerged from
half century of isolation. Myanmar has always been an
agriculture-oriented economy but the government has been laying
building blocks, especially for the development of Small and
Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). SMEs are "smaller than big
business houses in terms of factors such as number of employees,
asset base, annual revenue and the ownership structure".
The success of SME development depends on various external
factors (namely, policy and regulatory environment, infrastructure,
corruption, access to finance, governance, bureaucratic hurdles,
business development services, among others) and internal factors
(namely, experience, capacity, organizational
