Recent evidence from firm surveys provides a broadly consistent picture of rising financial constraints beginning to restrict production levels. The European Commission’s business and consumer surveys suggest that the share of firms in the manufacturing sector reporting that financial constraints are a factor limiting production has doubled to 6 per cent since the start of our policy tightening (Chart 14, left panel).
This information for the manufacturing sector is broadly consistent with responses from the latest Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises (SAFE), where a rising share of firms reported “access to finance” as being a very important problem for their business (defined as a score of at least seven on a scale from one to ten) compared with other potential problems (Chart 14, right panel).