Supply-Chain Finance and Investment Efficiency: The Perspective of Sustainable Development

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I think this article should be extensively in terms of some major technical detail. In my opinion, the article was not accepted in the current forms due to the following reasons:

1.      The abstract does not highlight the specifics of your research or findings. Rewrite the Abstract section to be more meaningful. I suggest: problems, Aim, Methods, Results, and Conclusions.

2.      How come the authors excluded data from the period of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2023), which could have demonstrated to the reader the impact of the pandemic on the supply chain?

3.      The authors did not mention and discuss the study limitation.

4.       The literature review is inadequate and should be revised and improved. Many similar studies in the literature regarding supply chain. What is the novelty of this study? The last paragraph of the introduction section should clearly address the research gap, objective, and novelty.

5. Lack of novelty: The article does not present new or significant research or ideas, and was displayed as being derivative of previous work.
6. Poor quality of writing: The article is poorly written, with grammatical errors or unclear language that makes it difficult to understand.
7. Inadequate methodology: The research methods used in the study are not appropriate or are not adequately described, making it difficult to evaluate the results.
8. There is no comparison of the results with other studies from the literature. The discussion part is limited.
9. Require more in-depth and thorough discussion on the results obtained. Improve the results and discussion with valid recent supporting literature to improve the quality of the article. The interpretation of results should be well written in the paper. The results need further technical discussions.
10. The results are not significant and not enough to be publishable.
11. All the symbols should be defined. Many symbols and abbreviations are not defined within the text. When using the abbreviation, it should be given in the long form in the first place used. Review the use of abbreviations.
12. The conclusion should be written again. The conclusion should include the most important findings and outputs of your research.
13. The references sis not follow the journal style.
14. The paper should be written from the international perspective rather than focusing on the issues of one country.

Reviewer 2 Report

This study examines the relationship between Supply Chain Finance and corporate investment efficiency. The research perspective is novel, and two significant results are obtained. Financial constraint is an intermediary effect between Supply Chain Finance and under-investment, while Corporate social responsibility is an intermediary effect between Supply Chain Finance and over-investment. I think this paper has significant theoretical and practical value. However, some details deserve the attention of the authors.

1. There have been fewer references in the last three years in the references. Only 4 of the 39 references are post-2020. The authors are advised to add the latest literature to show that this study belongs to the hot topic.

2. The professional vocabulary in the paper is suggested to be unified, such as "fund flow" and "cash flow."

3. Please check your paper carefully for grammar and spelling mistakes. For example, two "under-investment" are on line 69 of the second page.

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper mainly evaluates both the impact and the mechanism by which, Supply Chain Finance influences corporate investment efficiency. On the whole, the paper is interesting and well-organized. However, there are still some issues to be solved, which have been listed as follows.

(1) In 1. Introduction, paragraph 1 is not well written. It is recommended to add the relevant background.

(2) In 2. Literature review, it lacks some important frontier literature and the latest literature. It is necessary to add the latest frontier literature on this topic.

(3) In 4.2. Variables, model (1) - (2) lack explanations of models and variables . The author needs to add the implications of model setting and the meaning of each variable (e.g., ε_it)

(4) The author should further check the paper format, for example, some numbers are not aligned in Min's column of “Table 1. Descriptive statistics” and column (4) in “Table 2. Basic regression”.

(5) In 5.3.3. Endogenous test, the author uses the fixed effect models in model (1) - (2), while in “5.3.3. Endogenous test”, the author still employs Hausman test to select the fixed effect model for test. Is this practice duplicated?

Reviewer 4 Report

Authors explained the relationship between Supply Chain Finance and corporate investment efficiency. Using data from China between 2010 and 2020, we find that Supply Chain Finance can alleviate the under-investment of enterprises and restrain their over-investment. The overall manuscript seems fine to me, the following points may consider to improve the quality of article.

1. Section 3.1, the hypothesis didn't linked with any literature of review.

2. Some of the citation didn't captioned with references such as 15.

3. The regression between two two scenarios needs to investigate from results to understand the outcome.

Reviewer 5 Report

This work examines the relationship between Supply Chain Finance and corporate investment efficiency. The topic is very interesting and deserves careful investigation. This content is quite consistent with the journal’s aim. However, the organization and writing of the present manuscript is not up to the standards of high level academic journal. Research gap and novelty are not clear enough. The abstract and conclusion sections are too general. It does not seem to provide any substantially new information or evidence on this topic. Some suggestions are provided for the authors' consideration.

1. The abstract is too general.

2. The language needs thorough editing. There are lots of grammatical mistakes and incorrect tenses.

3. Literature survey is not sufficient to present the most updated R&D status for further justification of the originality of the paper.

4. In the introduction, the logic between the paragraphs doesn't seem very clear.

5. Compared with the similar works listed in Refs., the innovation of this work is too weak.

6. Hypotheses development is too weak.

7. Conclusions section is too poor, and the authors should consider highlighting the main outcomes.