Building resilience for sustainability of MSMEs post COVID-19 outbreak: An Indian handicraft industry outlook

Vernika Agarwal; K Mathiyazhagan; Snigdha Malhotra; Busayamas Pimpunchat

doi:10.1016/j.seps.2022.101443

Building resilience for sustainability of MSMEs post COVID-19 outbreak: An Indian handicraft industry outlook

Socioecon Plann Sci. 2022 Sep 29:101443. doi: 10.1016/j.seps.2022.101443. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Vernika Agarwal¹, K Mathiyazhagan², Snigdha Malhotra³, Busayamas Pimpunchat⁴

Affiliations

¹ Amity International Business School, Amity University, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India.
² Thiagarajar School of Management, Madurai, 625005, Tamilnadu, India.
³ Fortune Institute of International Business, New Delhi, India.
⁴ Department of Mathematics, School of Science, King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang, Bangkok, 10520, Thailand.

Abstract

The handicraft business constitutes concept selling rather than mere product selling, which is highly dependent on demand. Handicrafts' Micro Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) have an expanding market in developed countries. The impact of the pandemic on this industry is severe due to the industry's informal nature and seasonal demand. The survival and resilience of these handicraft MSMEs face many challenges in the post-COVID-19 outbreak. The focus of the present study is to understand and analyze the key challenges for building resilience in handicraft MSMEs by scrutinizing the existing literature and interactions with stakeholders. EFA and the Grey DEMATEL approach are used to analyze the challenges for the adoption of resilience. EFA is used to categorize the challenges into various dimensions. The study has divided the challenges for the inclusion of resilience into survivable, sustainable, and viable categories using EFA to plan for short- and long-term business growth. Grey DEMATEL is being utilized for understanding these contextual relationships for each resilience dimension. Grey systems theory is a methodology that enables the incorporation of improbability and vagueness into the analysis. Findings of the study revealed the influencing challenges for each of the dimensions such as competition from machine-made products, insufficient government support and incentives for export, and inefficient managerial concern and response to internationalization as the prominent challenges. The results of this study illustrate the causal relationships amongst the identified resilience challenges to the various stakeholders. These findings offer practical insights for the government to allocate resources and impose measures to ensure resilience, as well as understanding the cause-effect relationship. Managerial implications and Policy insights for building the resilience of handicraft MSMEs are discussed in detail.

Keywords: COVID-19; Exploratory factor analysis; Grey DEMATEL; Handicraft industry; India; Resilience; Sustainability.