Loans to small businesses have continued to decline in 2011, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Loans outstanding to small businesses totaled $609 billion at the end of March, an 8.6 percent drop from a year earlier, according to the most recent data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which analyzes loans of less than $1 million.

Another lending analysis, by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, found that big banks’ outstanding loans to small businesses dropped 14 percent between March 2010 and March 2011, while loans by smaller lenders fell 3 percent.

Business owners rank access to capital as the most important issue facing privately held companies, according to a recent poll of entrepreneurs at Pepperdine University. In the past six months, only 17 percent of loan-seeking businesses with less than $5 million in annual revenues landed bank financing, the study found.

The situation is different for larger companies. About 37 percent of respondents from privately held companies with revenues greater than $25 million have secured bank loans in the past six months, according to the Pepperdine study.

To read the full story in The Wall Street Journal, click here.