Does the Business Environment Improve the Sustainable Development of Enterprises?

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I would like to thank the authors for the opportunity to read the manuscript titled "Does business environment improve the sustainable development of enterprises? - Based on the perspective of high- quality development of enterprises".

The article is interesting, promising, and contains topical issues that underscore the need to address Covid-19 consequences. However, some parts of the article need to be modified/ supplemented before it can be published.

I recommend that the authors shorten the title.

The abstract should be explained more clearly - I miss a description of the objectives and methods. 

I appreciate empirical research and its results. However, I recommend supplementing the still used sources with literature from the Web of Science and Scopus databases with knowledge of Central European authors in the field of business environment and sustainability.

The authors should clearly explain the research problem and the objectives of the study based on the supplemented literature review. Authors need to be clearer and more specific about the "missing piece of the puzzle" that their research should cover. I usually recommend the following logical flow for the introduction: 1) What is the problem and why is it important, 2) What do we know, 3) What do we not know, and finally 4) What are we doing about it.

For the question "How does the business environment affect the sustainable development of enterprises?", please indicate at which stage of the business process the affect is present? The business environment has an impact on companies that may be at different stages of the entrepreneurial process (early stage, established companies, growing companies, exit strategies...).

The Discussion and Conclusion sections provides a simple summary of the results that support both hypotheses. However, this raises the question of what is new about the results of this research. This needs to be more clearly highlighted in the compilation of the literature review and conceptual framework and discussed in the Discussion/Conclusion section to clarify the contribution of the work to the body of knowledge.

While the research idea is appealing and has the potential to contribute to the scientific literature, the author(s) need to improve the derivation of the research idea and link it to previous work in the field.

The limitations of the study are not adequately described. The future scope of the study is not mentioned.

Table 1 needs to be changed - some text is not visible. Citations in the text should follow the journal instructions.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

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Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,

Thank you very much for the opportunity to review your paper. I appreciate the level of econometric analysis; however, I have the following concerns which finally impact my recommendation:

1.       What do you mean by “business environment”? You use very old concept, related to institutional environment, legal environment, market environment and social environment. The most resent attitude is to discuss on entrepreneurial ecosystem, which is far better in the context of high-quality development. At least, you need to compare the concept of business environment with entrepreneurial ecosystem.

2.       Abstract and introduction: “Further analysis shows that in non-manufacturing listed companies, and eastern and western regions, business environment plays a more significant role in the sustainable development of enterprises”. For international readers, eastern and western regions are not recognizable. You should find some general feature of them, not just the location, to make some justification and explanation of these results.

3.       Introduction should refer to literature to justify your research topic.

4.       Literature on business environment should be deeper and more updated, and refer to entrepreneurial ecosystem as the newest concept.

5.       Literature on sustainable development of companies should be deeper and more updated.

6.       Justification of research gap should be more clear.

7.       Development of hypothesis 1 (p. 4) must be better grounded in theory.

8.       Reference to neoclassical growth theory (p. 4) as explanation for hypothesis 2 is highly unjustified. Neoclassical growth theory: (1) gives rather historical perspective, you refer to publication from 1960, (2) explains the macroeconomic level of analysis, while your research is on enterprises, and (3) is replaced by the concept of sustainability as development path (alternative to economic growth). As generally, you refer to sustainability in your paper, explanations on neoclassical growth theory is irrelevant.

9.       Variables which you accepted as presenting sustainable development of enterprises (tab. 1) have nothing to do with sustainability, they just present the economic performance of companies, definitely not sustainable development.

10.   You combine several factors into one composite indicator; however, you do not explain how do you do that.

11.   You accept 1 dependent variable being a composite indicator, and 1 independent variable (marketization – you must explain details how it is measured), 6 intermediary variables and 5 control variables. My concern is to which extent your results are biased due to the number of intermediary and control variables compared to 1 independent variable. I suppose they might be.

12.   You have not checked the collinearity among variables.

13.   The variables in the composite indicator overlap the intermediary and/ or control variables, e.g. number of employees. You should delete overlapping variables from your model and re-estimate it.

14.   In conclusions, you should refer to the presented theoretical explanations.

15.   There is no novelty described in the conclusions. You should explain what your contribution to our understanding of business activities.

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for all your improvements. I think that the article is now much better.

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper has been substantially improved. Accept in present form. 

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,

Congratulations, in my opinion, you implemented all needed changes and your paper is ready for publication.