293and even among experts) of the sheer scale of government support for SMEs and entrepreneurs. There is therefore a need for synergies and sometimes fewer HGE support programs, which should be coordinated across government departments and across the various levels of aggregation (local, regional, national), with these programs having explicit goals (job creation, creation of tax revenue, innovation, unemployment reduction, rural development, etc.), and also rigorous evaluations to see if the initiatives meet their stated goals.

Acknowledgments We are grateful to Sofia Amaral-Garcia, Peter Bauer, Andrea Crisanti, Clemens Domnick, Helmut Kraemer-Eis, Pavlova Elitsa, Debora Revoltella, Sebastian Schich, and Wouter van der Wielen for many helpful discussions and comments. We are also grateful to Karl Wennberg and Christian Sandström (the editors) and an anonymous reviewer for helpful feedback. Any remaining errors are ours alone. The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the European Investment Bank.

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