Project "Resilience Enhancing Policies: Exploring the Role of Public Grants" started on 1st September 2021 and runs until 28th February 2023.
Project is funded by the Croatian Science Foundation (IP-CORONA-2020-12-1064) based on their decision (Klasa: 120-02/21-02/13; Ur.broj: 63-02/01-21-11 from 6th July 2021).
Summary of the Project Proposal
The economic consequence of the COVID 19 pandemic has triggered the Croatian government to develop a number of public policies aimed at strengthening the overall resilience of Croatian private sector organizations. Organizational resilience refers to the process by which organizations use its resources and capabilities to interact with the environment in a way that positively adjust and maintains functioning prior to, during, and following adversity. In order to make Croatian companies more resilient to the adversity associated with the COVID 19 pandemic, the key policy of the Croatian government was the development and implementation of a public grants scheme. By conducting a mixed methods study of the effectiveness of the Croatian governments public grants scheme – we propose to examine the challenges and outcomes of resilience enhancing policies. By resilience enhancing policies we refer to policies developed by governmental bodies and/or multi-lateral organizations in order the strengthen the overall resilience of organizations within a sector, industry or overall economy. By doing so, the proposed research will conduct two inter-related studies.
First, by drawing on the literature on public grants aimed at small and medium enterprises (SMEs), the proposed research will explore – at a national level, the overall effectiveness of governmental grants in enhancing resilience. The study will have a special emphasis on SMEs due to their higher vulnerability to market adversity and overall importance for the national economy. Public SME grants are financial policy measures developed by (non)governmental bodies in order to stimulate entrepreneurial development. The empirical literature on SME grants has mostly displayed positive effects of such programes on overall firm survival, employment, sales etc. Despite this fact, we still lack insights on the effectiveness of these policies in times of crisis, and their impact on overall resilience of SMEs. The PI is an internationally recognized scholar on this topic, with a number of publications in leading journals in the field. In particular, he has recently published a systematic literature review of empirical evidence on robust public grants policy evaluations for entrepreneurs and SMEs (see Dvouletý, Srhoj, & Pantea, 2020), as well as counterfactual policy evaluations in the Republic of Croatia using the majority of the databases that are necessary for this project (e.g. Srhoj, Lapinski, & Walde, 2020; Srhoj, Škrinjarić, & Radas, 2019; Srhoj & Walde, 2020; Srhoj & Žilić, 2020).
Second, although a large number of organizations have received governmental grants, not all of these organizations were equally resilient, with many of them going into financial blockage and bankruptcy. By drawing on the literature on organizational configurations – multidimensional organizational characteristics that commonly occur together, we will inductively explore why some organizations were more resilient than others. The configurational approach will allow us to understand organizations as clusters of interconnected structures and practices rather than individual variables thus taking a holistic view that will enable the identification of patterns related to organizational resilience. Although there exists a significant body of literature on organizational configurations and firm performance, we still lack insights on the nature of this relationship in the context of policy evaluation in general, and organizational resilience in particular.
This research project answers the call for analysis of the role of pandemic-induced public and economic policies in the recovery and increase of resilience of the entrepreneurship and non-profit sectors. The research design itself is highly innovative and offers a high level of transferability for similar future research in the context of organizational resilience and public policy. Being able to identify key antecedents of organizational resilience and evaluate the success of economic policies in increasing the resilience of business organizations will provide invaluable insights for the development and implementation of better public and economic policies in the face of external shocks. The proposed project will also provide a useful model for effective research-to practice partnerships, which will potentially allow for the proposed work to be extended to other institutional settings.