A working paper from the Bank of Italy has found that a partial credit guarantee programme in one region of the country helped beneficiary firms to borrow on a longer-term basis and more cheaply, while the total amount of bank debt was unaffected.

The paper: The Causal Effect of Credit Guarantees for SMEs: Evidence from Italy, by Alessio D'Ignazio and Carlo Menon, aims to fill the gap of empirical research on such schemes, which they say are "widespread in both developed and developing economies