What Kept the Boat Afloat? Sustainability of Employment in Knowledge-Intensive Sectors Due to Government Measures during COVID-19 Pandemic

Michal Hrivnák, Peter Moritz and Marcela Chreneková
Additional contact information
Michal Hrivnák: Department of Regional and Rural Development, Slovak University of Agriculture, 949 76 Nitra, Slovakia
Peter Moritz: Department of Regional and Rural Development, Slovak University of Agriculture, 949 76 Nitra, Slovakia
Marcela Chreneková: Department of Regional and Rural Development, Slovak University of Agriculture, 949 76 Nitra, Slovakia

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 15, 1-21

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.

Keywords: SMEs; resilience; sustainable entrepreneurship; governmental support; COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/15/8441/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/15/8441/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:15:p:8441-:d:603555

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().