Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed new aspects of sustainable entrepreneurship and the resilience of SMEs in the conditions of individual countries. This empirical study contributes to entrepreneurship sustainability literature and business resilience literature by estimating the impact of various utilized internal crisis management tools and state compensation measures on retaining the pre-crisis levels of employment after two waves of the pandemic on the conditions of a V4 country. The study adopts an econometric approach towards assessing the influence of key factors of mitigating the problems caused by the pandemic, and the results suggest a crucial role of digitalization, internal policies optimizing variable costs, and utilization of direct governmental supportive measures to compensate for restrictions in force for employment retention in knowledge-intensive SMEs. According to the results, knowledge-intensive SMEs appears to have increased resilience towards economic shocks due to the capability to swiftly change the management of ventures to adapt to a crisis.
Highlights
The global pandemic of COVID-19 has hit the economy relatively hard on a global scale [1], and various measures by states to reduce the spread of the virus have led to rising unemployment in several sectors of the economy [2]
The first restrictive measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic appeared in Slovakia in March 2020
Our results suggest that government measures to compensate for the negative effects of restrictions on movement and business during the COVID-19 crisis contributed to the stabilization of SMEs, as other studies have suggested [37,54]
Summary
The global pandemic of COVID-19 has hit the economy relatively hard on a global scale [1], and various measures by states to reduce the spread of the virus have led to rising unemployment in several sectors of the economy [2]. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the nature of entrepreneurship sustainability research [3]. Sustainable entrepreneurship can be defined as a business that protects nature and supports the life and development of communities in search of perceived opportunities to deliver future products and services to generate profit and uneconomic benefits for society [4]. The economic market is severely disrupted during a crisis [8]; the pandemic has hit the supply and demand side of the market on a global scale, as various restrictions on mobility, social distance, or business constraints were introduced [9], which have led to a significant reduction in demand for products or services and the subsequent transformation of markets [10]. The stability of companies, and in particular small and medium-sized enterprises, is a precondition for maintaining employment and for the economic and social development of the regions
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