Since China’s reform and opening up, Chinese SMEs have developed rapidly and have gradually become an important force in China’s economic development. Under the trend of economic globalization, Chinese SMEs, which have experienced more than 20 years of development, are remarkable in terms of their activity in the economic arena and their contribution to China’s economic development. However, under the current high-speed development of the international situation, Chinese SMEs still face many constraints and difficulties in developing markets. We should explore countermeasures for this and provide some ideas and references for Chinese SMEs to seize the opportunity to develop markets and economic development and drive China’s economic development.

This study describes the structure of the capital markets for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and startup companies in Korea, which is an emerging market that has experienced drastic changes. The overall capital market can be divided into private and public capital markets. In the private capital market, most of the demand for capital comes from non-listed private firms, including startups and SMEs. In the case of SMEs and startups, the KOSDAQ, the Korea New Exchange (KONEX), and primary collateralized bond obligations (P-CBOs) are part of the public capital market. SMEs and startups are generally incapable of raising sufficient capital owing to their low credit ratings, and they largely have limited access to primary markets to issue shares and borrow money. The Korean government has developed a systematic financial aid program to provide funds to these companies. The fund for SMEs has significantly contributed to the development of the venture capital market. Many Korean banks provide substantial lending to SMEs, but this lending is available only because of the Korean government’s loan recovery guarantee. Furthermore, SMEs can issue corporate debt in the form of primary collateralized bond obligations through government guarantees, but such debt issuances have placed increasing pressure on public guarantee institutions.

This study examines the acceptance factors, barriers, benefits, and strategies for resolving Information and Communication Technology (ICT) adoption and usage problems based on the different demographic characteristics of SMEs. The demographic characteristics investigated are gender, educational qualifications, age, managerial status, and years of business experience. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to examine a more comprehensive demographic characteristics in the context of ICT adoption. A survey using selfadministered questionnaires was conducted to retrieve information from SME owners/managers in Pekalongan, the local city of Indonesia. The items in the questionnaire were discussed with various experts in the field and a pilot study was conducted prior to the distribution of the research instrument. The study made some interesting findings. No significant differences were found in the SMEs’ adoption factors between the demographics of gender groups and educational qualifications. However, significant disparities were found to exist among the age compositions, managerial status, and years in business. Additionally, younger managers/owners of SMEs find it easier to understand the background factors of ICT adoption. Lastly, older managers/owners are more likely to stick to the organizational status quo, be less able to learn new technology, and more likely to avoid risky decisions.

This study develops a mediating model to explore the relationships between organizational characteristics, manager’s knowledge, management commitment, user involvement, information quality, and management information system effectiveness in small- and medium-sized enterprises in Vietnam. Adapting scales from previous research, the authors designed questionnaires, which they distributed to respondents in Vietnamese small- and medium-sized enterprises. Also, by employing a meta-analytic path analysis throughout structural equation modelling (SEM) with sample of 356 respondents, authors indicate that organizational characteristics are directly related to management information systems effectiveness. Moreover, manager’s knowledge, user involvement, and information quality show their important roles in the increase of management information system effectiveness, yet management commitment does not indicate a similar role in the growth of management information system effectiveness. Bootstrapping is utilized to discover the meditating role of information quality, illustrating that quality information mediates the linkages between user involvement, organizational characteristics, and management information systems. However, the mediating role of information quality in the relationship between management commitment, manager’s knowledge, and management information systems is not significant. This study contributes to the management information system literature as well as to enhance MIS effects in small and medium-sized enterprises.

This study aims to examine the relationship of the four factors that increase the protection of minority shareholder investment. The factors are non-controlling shareholders, corporate governance, free cash flow, and shareholder wealth. The data for this study is obtained from the 2017 annual reports of 136 Thai public companies listed in the Market of Alternative Investment of Thailand (MAI). The analysis uses a multiple regression model to determine which factors encourage and which inhibit the protection of minority shareholder investment. The study tests four hypotheses. The results rejected H1 because non-controlling shareholders have negatively correlated with minority shareholder investment protection (beta -0.155 and p-value 0.050). The results accepted H2, H3 and H4 as follows. H2: corporate governance has positively correlated with minority shareholder investment protection (beta 0.17 and p-value 0.031). H3: free cash flow has positively correlated with minority shareholder investment protection (beta 0.214 and p-value 0.007). H4: shareholder wealth has positively correlated with minority shareholder investment protection (beta 0.318 and p-value 0.000). The major findings suggest strong minority shareholder investment protection was enhanced by increasing corporate governance, free cash flow and shareholder wealth. The protection of minority shareholder investment needs to reduce non-controlling shareholding pattern.

Taxes are levied in almost every country, primarily to raise revenue for government expenditures. This study explores factors influencing tax compliance of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam. Data from 376 SMEs, who are business taxpayers, were collected through a researcher–administered questionnaire survey method. The results indicate that six groups of factors have significant impacts on tax compliance among Vietnamese SMEs. These groups include: Business characteristics (BC), Characteristics of accounting practices within organization (AP), Awareness of tax obligations (TO), Tax policy (TP), View on tax compliance (TC), and Probability of tax examination on taxpayer compliance (TE). Multivariate analysis was adopted; Cronbach’s alpha coefficients were calculated, then, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was used. The findings show that, among these six factors, the most influential is Characteristics of accounting practices (AP). Thus, it is recommended that tax agencies should help SMEs improve their accounting skills and increase their knowledge by organizing training workshops and short courses on taxation. SMEs also need to have an adequate accounting system in accordance with principles and standards prescribed by the Tax Law. It is expected that this study can provide important insights and understandings to policy-makers, practitioners, academicians and other regulatory authorities in tax policy formulations.

Research on employee commitment to the organization is necessary for human resource management, and the result is applied in practice to improve organizational effectiveness. The aim of the present study is to explore factors affecting organizational commitment at the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam. Besides, the relationship between organizational commitment and job performance is examined as well. The research was conducted on a sample consisting of 67 white-collar workers and 260 blue-collar workers at SMEs. A total of 327 valid complete questionnaires were input into SPSS 20 database for processing to provide evidence. The research model and hypotheses were tested using the technique of the hierarchical multiple regression analysis. The research results revealed that income, reward and welfare, direct manager, working environment, coworker, and promotion opportunity tended to associate positively with organizational commitment. Besides, the finding also showed that, when the employee has a high organizational commitment, it would lead to high job performance. The main findings of this study provided some managerial implications for SMEs, in general, and managers, in particular. It implies that Vietnam’s small and medium-sized enterprises should improve these six factors to retain employees as well as enhance their job performance.

The fourth industrial revolution has attracted much academic attention in these past few years. However, research on systematic and extensive factors affecting adoption of Industry 4.0 by SMEs in developing countries, especially in Vietnam, has been unavailable. This study aims to explore the impact of factors that influence the actual adoption of Industry 4.0 by SMEs in Ho Chi Minh City. Mixed-method research was utilized in this study including in-depth interviews of 12 participants and quantitative research of 396 respondents who are representative of SMEs by both online and via paper surveys. The SPSS and SmartPLS 3 software were employed to help analyze the collected data. The results indicate that perceived development of the human resource, perceived on-time, perceived saving cost, perceived improve product quality, perceived saving time, perceived ease-of-use, business resources, and conditions of the business environment, perceived usefulness, perceived enhanced customer relationship, and adoption intention, all have a positive significant effect on actual adoption of Industry 4.0. The results seem to suggest that managerial efforts aimed at increasing the factors’ perceptions of adoption of Industry 4.0 and personal relevance of the technology will contribute to implementation success, where success is defined as effectual usage of the Industry 4.0.

This research investigates the determinants of investment capital size in Vietnam’s small and medium-sized firms. The study employs a sample of 458 small and medium-sized enterprises in the country. The study is based on data collects in the areas of Hanoi, Bac Can, Buon Ma Thuot and Pleiku Provinces at time series data of October 2019. This study also identifies the factors that affect the size of investment capital in medium and small-sized enterprises in Vietnam. Data are processed via STATA 14.0 and SPSS 20.0 software. The research results indicate that (1) business lines, (2) import and export business, (3) type of business registration, (4) business location, (5) operating time, and (6) the percentage of the organization’s capital contribution are factors that impact on the size of the investment capital of the business. Business line and business location have negative impacts on investment capital size. The operating time, the percentage of the organization’s capital contribution, import and export business, and the type of business registration have positive impacts on investment capital size. In addition, the findings of this study also suggest that the operation time has the highest impact on investment capital size of the small and medium-sized firms in Vietnam.

The paper investigates the factors that affect the demand for a voluntary audit of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam. A structured questionnaire survey of 284 SMEs was employed, preceded by in-depth interviews with auditors and SMEs’ managers. The research used logistic regression estimator to address econometric issues and to improve the accuracy of the regression coefficients. The results show that the degree of director’s view on voluntary audit, related stakeholder, degree of recommendation, and firm size have a statistically significant positive effect on audit decisions of SMEs while degree of audit fee has a statistically significant negative effect, and degree of subjective norm does not affect. This indicated that SMEs are more likely to have an external audit if they have some typical features: it is becoming larger in terms of size, and the directors consider that the audit has a relative benefit outweighing its cost. The research results suggested that Vietnam Government should make a statutory audit of SMEs’ financial statements rather than make it an option for SMEs. The auditing firms were also recommended to actively take their audit services to SMEs rather than waiting for the SMEs’ managers to contact them for their services.

This study focuses on determining the impacts of organizational culture on the accounting information system and the operational performance of small and medium-sized enterprises in Ho Chi Minh City. The paper is organized in five parts: introduction, literature review, research methodology, research results, and conclusion and policy implications. Based on the samples of 353 respondents working in small and mediumsized enterprises in Ho Chi Minh City, the research employs both qualitative and quantitative methods to find the answers for research questions. Group discussion, which yields final observed variables of the factors of organizational culture is used for qualitative method. Statistics, assessment of the reliability of Cronbach's Alpha scale, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM) are used for quantitative procedure. The results show that mission, involvement and inconsistency in organizational culture positively affect the accounting information system of small and medium-sized firms in Vietnam. In addition, mission, involvement, adaptability and consistency in organizational culture are found to have positive impacts on the firm operational performance. Another finding of the study is that the accounting information system has a positive effect on operational performance of small and medium-sized firms in Vietnam.

Purpose - From the advanced path of development and current situation, the development of enterprises plays a tremendous role in promoting national economic growth and raising the overall national strength. Therefore, this paper aims at examining the mutual effect between small & medium enterprises and economic growth. Research design, data, and methodology - In order to address the operating mutual effect between the small & medium enterprises and economic growth more clearly, this paper sets Alibaba Group and Hangzhou as an example. Meanwhile, the annual data from 2000 to 2017 will be employed, and an empirical analysis will be performed under the vector error correction model. Results - The findings display that the total revenue of Alibaba Group has a positive effect on economic growth in city of Hangzhou. However, the Granger Causality test implies that there is only a unidirectional causality between total revenue of Alibaba Group and economic growth in Hangzhou. More specifically, 1% increase in total revenue of Alibaba Group can result in 0.272% in economic growth of Hangzhou in the long run. Conclusions - In summary, for the long run, the local governments should promulgate a series of policies to assist the small & medium enterprises like Alibaba Group to improve the local economic growth as seen in the city of Hangzhou.