BARRIERS FOR MANUFACTURING SMES: A SYSTEMATIC EMPIRICAL RE-VIEW AND FUTURE RESEARCH AGENDA

Small and Medium-sector enterprises play an important role in creating employment opportunities, poverty reduction, GDP growth and economic improvement in any country. Thus it is considered as the backbone of the economy. The objective of this paper is to examine the entrepreneurship literature that discusses the barriers for small and medium-sector manufacturing organizations and set future research directions through a systematic literature review. To do this systematic literature review, a number of researches that investigated the barriers for manufacturing SMEs have been taken into consideration. To conduct the review, the PRISMA Method (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) has been followed. This study is based on journal articles published in databases such as Emerald Insight, Sage, Research Gate Net, Taylor & Francis, Science Direct and Google Scholar. After setting inclusion & exclusion criteria, 60 journal articles were selected. Economic issues, financial barriers, political barriers, lean manufacturing barriers, internationalization barriers, e-commerce adoption barriers, lack of resources and management issues have been identified as the prominent barriers for manufacturing SMEs. However, there is no adequate evidence to support that institutions and human capital are strong determinants for SME development. In line with the systematic literature review, most of the research to investigate SME barriers had been done in developing countries. However, research is scarce in South Asian countries like Sri Lanka, Nepal, Maldives and Bhutan. At the same time, the majority of the studies utilized the quantitative methodology to investigate the SME barriers. Qualitative researches are comparatively less. Therefore, more attention is needed to fill these gaps in existing literature to get a full understanding of the matter. Thus, this literature-based study calls for a new research agenda to investigate such issues as it directly and indirectly results in to improvement of the entire SME sector.