Picking Winners Amongst Manufacturing SMEs Using Data from Australia’s Business Longitudinal Survey

Abstract The research described in this paper uses panel data recently made available from the Australian federal government’s Business Longitudinal Survey. The objective is to devise a convenient means for reliably classifying manufacturing SMEs as to their most likely future development pathway on the basis of measured values for key enterprise age, size and growth variables. Some success is reported in employing relatively simple logistic regression modelling to replicate the author’s previous assignment of manufacturing SMEs to certain dominant development pathways over time using more cumbersome exploratory cluster analysis. This success is, however, limited to distinguishing high growth SMEs from other concerns. Nevertheless, the logistic regression models presented should allow other researchers and also policy-makers with the necessary data to identify with some confidence and relative ease the high growth manufacturing SMEs of greatest economic significance.