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The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether new and young firms are different from older firms. This analysis is undertaken to explore general characteristics, use of external resources and growth orientation.

Data from the 2008 UK Federation of Small Businesses survey provided 8,000 responses. Quantitative analysis identified significantly different characteristics of firms from 0‐4, 4‐9, 9‐19 and 20+ years. Factor analysis was utilised to identify the advice sets, finance and public procurement customers of greatest interest, with ANOVA used to statistically compare firms in the identified age groups with different growth aspirations.

The findings reveal key differences between new, young and older firms in terms of characteristics including business sector, owner/manager age, education/business experience, legal status, intellectual property and trading performance. New and young firms were more able to access beneficial resources in terms of finance and advice from several sources. New and young firms were also able to more easily access government and external finance, as well as government advice, but less able to access public procurement.

New and young firms are utilising external networks to access several resources for development purposes, and this differs for older firms. This suggests that a more explicit age‐differentiated focus is required for government policies aimed at supporting firm growth.

The study provides important baseline data for future quantitative and qualitative studies focused on the impact of firm age and government policy.

This study aims to analyze the individual and joint effects of institutional support by government and nongovernment institutions on early internationalizing firms’ (EIFs) performance. It also investigated the moderating impact of firm age and size on the institutional support-firms’ export performance relationships.

Data were collected from 705 EIFs in the apparel industry of Bangladesh and analyzed with hierarchical regression.

The positive influence of institutional support on exporting firms’ financial performance is stronger for the joint effect of government and nongovernment assistance than the individual impact. Firms’ size positively moderates the impact of individual government and nongovernment assistance, while age positively moderates their resource-bundling effect.

The findings suggest the necessity of integrating resources from diverse but complementary sources of institutional support for superior export performance. The findings also show the presence of the liability of smallness and liability of newness in the standalone and joint influence of institutional support, respectively.

Firms need to bundle resources obtained from the government (unrequited) and nongovernment (reciprocal) institutional support to overcome the liability of smallness they might encounter while availing of support from only one source.

Distinguishing between government and nongovernment institutional support, this paper sheds light on exporting firms’ resource-bundling mechanism for these two sources of support in the backdrop of an emerging economy. It also offers fresh insights into the critical role of the liabilities of newness and smallness in early internationalization, especially with regard to the home-country institutional environment.

Philanthropy is taken as a strategic behavior by private enterprises to obtain financial resources from governments. This paper aims to examine the relationship between private enterprise philanthropy and the debt finance, further investigating the way by which governments exchange resources with private enterprises.

The paper opted for an empirical study using a sample of 1,489 Chinese private-listed companies from 2007 to 2010. The study analyzed the relationship between philanthropy and debt finance based on the resource dependence theory and social exchange theory and tested the moderating effect of political connection.

Philanthropy can help private enterprises to get the debt finance, and this effect occurs mainly among the political connected private enterprises; the higher degree of credit allocation marketization is, the less philanthropy can affect the debt finance and the less influence political connection can exert on that relationship. Philanthropy contributes to debt financing mainly because it can help obtain more long-term loan, and this effect is more obvious for politically connected private enterprises in regulated industries.

This paper verifies the action logic of private enterprises philanthropy from the perspective of exchange behavior, which is helpful to understand the motive and influence of private enterprises philanthropy.

This study aims to study the moderating effects of private ownership and government support on the relationship between outsourcing and product innovation in entrepreneurial ventures in a transition economy.

The data of 10,296 Vietnamese entrepreneurial ventures from the four rounds of the survey conducted by the General Statistics Office (GSO) of Vietnam to investigate the moderating effects of private ownership and government support on the association between outsourcing and entrepreneurial ventures’ product innovation performance. The Probit regression model is employed to estimate such associations.

Our research uncovered that the impact of outsourcing on the likelihood of product innovation is more significant for entrepreneurial operations characterized by a substantial degree of private ownership and government backing as opposed to those without.

The results of our research indicated that the resource-based perspective and extended resource-based view (ERBV) are essential in examining the impact of gaining resources or skills from external sources on the growth of entrepreneurial enterprises. These ideas have significance and importance not just in industrialized economies but also in countries undergoing transition. Our findings suggest that entrepreneurial enterprises should have the ability to manage a wide range of resources and make decisions about which activities should be handled internally and which should be delegated to other parties.

Our findings also imply that entrepreneurial ventures should be able to control many resources and choose which tasks should be performed in-house and which should be outsourced to third parties.

By adopting and leveraging the resource-based view (RBV) and extended resource-based views (ERBV), our study developed a theoretical model about private ownership and government support for moderate outsourcing’s impact on entrepreneurial innovation in a transition economy.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the mechanism of the role of government subsidies on corporate environmental investment and explore how specific characteristics of firms affect corporate environmental responsibility.

This paper examines the relationship between government subsidies and corporate environmental investment and models with a sample of 78,854 industries. The authors measure the corporate environmental investment by the natural logarithm of the volume of waste gas treatment facilities.

The results show the positive effect of government subsidies on corporate environmental investment. In addition, state ownership positively regulates the relationship between government and corporations, but the relationship between them is negatively regulated by the slack resources.

When people are increasingly concerned about corporate social and environmental responsibility, clarifying the link between government subsidies and corporate environmental investments can help policymakers formulate policies and allocate limited resources.

This study uses the resource-based view as a theoretical framework to reveal the mechanism of action between government subsidies and corporate environmental responsibility, enriching the previous literature that explores the issue based on the legitimacy perspective.

Drawing from social capital theory and resource dependence theory, this paper aims to test the relationship between top management team (TMT) government social capital and firm’s innovation performance via firm’s network prestige, and the moderating effect of TMT academic social capital.

The authors collected data from the China Stock Market and Accounting Research Database as well as A-share listed firms’ annual reports, and finally generated a sample of 922 firms and 2,464 firm-years from 2008 to 2014. UCINET 6.0 was used to analyze the data.

The authors find that the government social capital of TMT is positively related to firms’ innovation performance and firms’ network prestige plays a mediating role in this relationship. In addition, TMT academic social capital can strengthen the links between TMT government social capital and innovation performance through firms’ network prestige.

This paper not only contributes to literatures on the mechanism in the relationship between government social capital and firms’ innovation, but also to literatures on the effectiveness of the heterogeneity of firm’s social capital.

African countries are endowed with both human and natural resources. These resources constitute integral components for any economic development due to the long-lasting relationship with all sectors in an economy, yet there is an obvious disagreement between growing economy and employment generation in Africa. Though there has been a growing pattern of economic size, particularly the gross domestic product (GDP) among African countries, most of these economies are low in human development. The disagreement between economic growth and employment generation in Africa despite abundant natural resources located on the continent calls for public discourse among scholars. Therefore, the purpose of the study is to examine the peculiar drivers of unemployment intensity in a region characterized by endowed resources.

The paper adopts two approaches; the authors employed the pooled mean group (PMG) estimator and utilised stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to generate a government efficiency index between the period 1991 and 2017 among sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries.

The empirical results through the single output-multiple inputs framework indicate that on average, there is a low level of government efficiency towards increasing the objective of human development in Africa. However, in the long run, natural resource endowment has a positive and significant relationship with employment generation for SSA. Hence, the study established that a low level of government efficiency has a long-lasting effect on low human development experienced in Africa.

The need to improve the level of government efficiency towards economic development by making both human and physical capital more effective will spur the exploration of natural resources.

The paper provides an empirical study of the effectiveness and efficiency of government through PMG and SFA in establishing the relationship between government approaches and employment level in selected SSA countries.

This paper aims to investigate the moderating effect of efficiency and non-market capability in the relationship between government involvement and resources to performance of water supply companies (PDAM) in Sulawesi, Indonesia.

This paper is explanatory in nature, i.e. it explains the relationship (causality) between the external environment variables (government involvement), internal environment variables (resources and non-market capabilities) and the performance of taps in Sulawesi through hypothesis testing. The research was conducted in six provinces in the northern peninsula of Sulawesi Island: North Sulawesi Province, Gorontalo Province, Central Sulawesi Province, Southeast Sulawesi Province, South Sulawesi Province and West Sulawesi Province. The research was undertaken from September 2011 to December 2011. The analysis unit in this research was PDAM, while the research population was the regional water company (PDAM) in Sulawesi. A quantitative approach was used for data analysis, i.e. variance-based inferential statistical analysis with structural equation modeling, known as partial least squares, with variable non-market capability acting as a moderating variable.

Government involvement has a significant and positive effect on the performance, indicating that the higher the government involvement, the higher the performance of a company. Efforts to reduce water loss level for PDAM is a strategic move, as they are associated with PDAM’s stakeholders. Water loss will lead to poor customer service, low contribution to the acceptance of regional governments and failure to meet natural conservation programs. On the other hand, to reduce the water loss level, considerable capital is needed for investment, for example, to finance the installation and repair of pipelines, pumps, mains water meter, customer water meter, the cost of water treatment, fuel costs and the expansion of the water source. In general, PDAM in Sulawesi still has problems in terms of expansion because of the lack of funding sources; hence, the role of regional government as the owner is expected, both in the form of financial aid and the tariff adjustment. The government should be in favor of thorough development of drinking water, as embodied in the form of finance, budget commitment and the commitment to the development of PDAM.

The limitations of this study are that the data used in this study are cross-sectional, so they only describe the condition at a particular time. Also, the sample was limited to Sulawesi taps; therefore, to generalize the findings, a larger sample needs to be considered.

The practical implications of this study are that development of water supply company cannot be separated from the government’s involvement as one of the stakeholders to improve corporate performance, especially through financial assistance. In connection with it, a board of directors or management of PDAM in every department of a company constantly works on government involvement, especially financial aid to fund or investment fund sharing, to improve service to customers. Such activities run a company aimed at achieving efficiency with emphasis on the efficiency of production and distribution capacity by managing the leakage rate, the emphasis on labor costs by keeping the ratio of employees ideal, the emphasis on aspects of the supply and distribution through control of water resources and water meter mains and water customers and an emphasis on the use of raw materials or chemicals with attention to the quality of raw water.

The social implications of this study are that government interventions are supported by the availability of resources according to the needs able to create efficiencies that have an impact on improving the performance of taps. Companies performing well can operate optimally in providing drinking water that meets health standards. In addition, the performance achieved allows the taps to embody the organization’s mission as a creator of jobs and local revenue for local governments.

Originality for this paper shows the moderating effect of efficiency and non-market capability in the relationship between government involvement and resources to PDAM. The originality also includes the location of this study (six provinces in the northern peninsula of Sulawesi Island: North Sulawesi Province, Gorontalo Province, Central Sulawesi Province, Southeast Sulawesi Province, South Sulawesi Province and West Sulawesi Province) as no previous research has investigated this relationship in this geography.

In fragile institutional environments, firms often have no choice but bribery as the means to access the services monopolized by the government. Corrupt government officials whose resources are valuable to many different firms can easily find other firms willing to offer bribes. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether and how this imbalanced interdependence exposes the bribing firm to the hazard of opportunism from the bribed officials.

This study draws on World Business Environment Survey (WBES) data and the instrumental variable (IV) Probit estimator with Heckman correction for the potential selection bias.

The authors find that the more firms depend on bribery to acquire governmental resources, the severer the level of opportunism they encounter from the government officials. In addition, the authors find that although the presence of a legal alternative to bribery reduces the level of a corrupt government official's opportunism that a bribing firm experiences, the more firms depend on bribery despite the presence of a legal alternative, the higher the level of the corrupt official's opportunism that the firm will experience. Finally, the authors find that establishing a relational contract with government officials reduces the hazard of opportunism.

The study contributes to the resource dependence literature by finding that a greater imbalance in the interdependence between two parties in bribery exposes the more dependent party to a larger hazard of opportunism. The finding that an ineffective alternative to a current resource provider would not strengthen but weaken a resource seeker's bargaining power expands the literature. The authors also contribute to the corruption research by showing the significant strategic, not legal, risk to bribing firms of engaging in bribery, which to date has not been sufficiently discussed.

Most studies in electronic government (e-government) sustainability focus on the role of specific actors (stakeholders such as government employees or citizens) in sustaining an e-government project. However, such actors may not have sufficient resources to support e-government sustainability by themselves and must collaborate across different departments and stakeholders to sustain e-government projects. This paper aims to take a social systems theory perspective on sustainable local e-government, where actors cooperate and coordinate in a social system to leverage resources for e-government sustainability in local government contexts in developing countries.

This paper is an interpretive study of two local e-government case studies based on in-depth interviews with local government information technology (IT) managers, local leaders and staff. Data analysis based on constructivist grounded theory is used to understand the role of a social system in sustaining e-government systems in local governments in developing countries.

The original social system theory was developed for industry initiatives and adapted for public organisations in this paper. The unique characteristics of the public sector and e-government innovation are used to identify new components of the social system related to local e-government. Local e-government is sustained through a collaboration between actors in a social system to leverage resources and reduce challenges.

While this is an exploratory study, the cases show that the use of a social system theory consisting of institutional, management, social and economic components requires multiple lenses for investigation. This is a challenging process because it requires different areas of knowledge to carry out the research. The challenges may influence the overall outcome of this study. In addition, the two cases may generate limited insight and experiences as this study was carried out within two local governments in Indonesia. The findings may not provide a strong basis for generalization to other contexts.

This study offers guidance to local government IT departments to improve collaboration in a social system between local actors (such as political, managers and staff) while implementing and using e-government systems.

Sustainable local e-government requires all actors to coordinate and cooperate in a social system to reduce financial, political and technical challenges.

This paper offers new insight into how a local government collaborates in a social system to realize sustainable e-government systems. Collaborating in a social system reduces common challenges and leverages resources to support e-government sustainability.