A Review of Global Challenges and Survival Strategies of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)

By Sisira Kumara Naradda Gamage, E. Ekanayake, G. Abeyrathne, R. Prasanna, J. Jayasundara, P. Rajapakshe. Economies, 2020

263 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Economic globalization has created many challenges for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) due to the rapid increase in competition. Therefore, the downfall rate of SMEs is relatively high, a short period after their commencement. Accordingly, SMEs need to adopt survival strategies and strategic methods to succeed in confronting the various global challenges faced by the SME sector. This study critically examined the existing literature on global challenges for SMEs to understand the SMEs’ survival and successive mechanisms in the present competitive business background. Published information related to the field by the multilateral institutions and 110 research papers published by four recognized publishing companies, i.e., Emerald, Elsevier, Taylor and Francis, and MDPI, were chosen for this study. The review revealed the critical global challenges for SMEs within the context of economic globalization. They are the global market competition, global finance and economic crises, information communication technology, the emergence of multi-national corporations, transnational corporations, consumer changes and especially their preferences, trade dumping, international terrorism, and religious conflicts and trade wars. Furthermore, the study considered the survival strategies of SMEs in the industrial platform to recognize sustainability-related policies, specifically, the necessity for a robust theoretical examination on the survival strategies of SMEs in the field of global challenges.

Subfields: Business and International Management, Management of Technology and Innovation, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/28cffaec86358b459a9054a3235bfb9ac74868a5

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Citations in the corpus

• Economic Growth, Increasing Productivity of SMEs, and Open Innovation (2021, background): “This means that the existence of SMEs will require coaching support related to business resilience, business competitiveness, marketing strategies, and mastery of technology in the era of globalization [77].”
• Economic Business Sustainability and Strengthening Human Resource Capacity Based on Increasing the Productivity of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Makassar City, Indonesia (2021, background): “Economic globalization has posed many challenges for SMEs due to increasingly fierce competition [24].”