COVID-19 Crisis and Resilience Measures: Evidence from Sri Lankan SmallScale Entrepreneurs

Abstract

A more than one year after the COVID-19 pandemic affected the national and global economies. In Sri Lanka, as a developing country, this situation highly impacts on small-scale entrepreneurs. This study explores the solutions to provide efficient benefits for small-scale entrepreneurs who are going through a pandemic crisis. To survive unpredictable global pandemic situations, small-scale businesses have advocated new methods and strategies to continue business operations by identifying both threats and opportunities of this crisis. The study aims to determine the impact of business resilience planning and investigate the resilience measures to cope with the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The study philosophy was positivism and conducted a deductive research approach that used a survey strategy with a cross-sectional time horizon. An online questionnaire-based survey with a 7-point Likert scale used to collect data from a sample of 107 small-scale entrepreneurs. This study has used quota sampling as a sampling method. The result demonstrates how business resilience impact mitigates the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 outbreak. The findings indicated a significant impact on business resilience from marketing strategies and employee arrangements because its important values are less than 0.05, and Beta values amount to 0.279 and 0.143, respectively. This study offers several contributions to researchers and extends the literature to provide a comprehensive focus for the country's economy and accelerate the up-skilling of small-scale entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka. This would be an approach for the government to identify potential business trends to improve small businesses easily.