The paper aims to contributing to the development of microcredit policies in Brazil. The current paper benefits from the survey about the Informal Urban Economy - ECINF, performed by the IBGE, where almost 50,000 self-employed and those employing up to five employees were interviewed. The microcredit market reveals to be incipient in the country's urban areas; only 7% of small businesses attained access to credit in the three months prior to the survey. We describe the pattern of correlation of access to productive credit use with other variables, in particular those connected with the ownership of real guarantees or social capital elements. The possession of equipments and the membership to cooperatives are positively correlated to the attainment of credit. The formality of businesses also presents strong correlation with access to loans. Overall, our results are consistent with the importance attributed in the literature on credit to both real and alternative forms of collateral.
credit; microcredit; colateral; informality; labor markets
