The potential role of private investors in financing rural entrepreneurship and SMEs in Serbia

This paper will address issues within the thematic component of Regional development - management of rural entrepreneurship. The authors will elaborate the financing of entrepreneurship through the development and attraction of private investors. In the second part they will consider aspects relating to specific characteristics of business angels. The third part of the paper will address the development of a model of financing rural entrepreneurship through stock exchanges. By character this is a research paper. Through the analysis of documentation related to the financing of entrepreneurship the paper will assess the current capacity for sustainable and local development of rural regions, with a focus on Serbia and other economies in transition. In a case study undertaken in Serbia with semi-structured interviews of carefully chosen representatives of local authority and active third sector stakeholders in rural development, authors of the paper will then examine the specific possibilities of increasing the currently insufficient role of private investors and will extend for discussion a model for benchmarking stock exchanges as a prerequisite for stock exchange based financing of rural entrepreneurship. Research from this paper will nominate for further discussion a thesis that exchanging visits to key stock exchanges in the region of South East Europe is one of the avenues to attract investors to rural regions.