Subash Sasidharan

The aim of this study is three-fold: first, to examine the relationship between government support and E-commerce adoption. Second, to investigate the nexus between government support and firm innovation. Third, to explore the relation of firm performance with E-commerce adoption and innovation. Using firm-level data from 31 countries during the time of COVID-19 pandemic, we find both E-commerce adoption and innovation are positively associated with government support. Further, we also find that such firms register significantly higher sales growth. The result remains consistent even after addressing the endogeneity issue. These results hold for the subsample of SMEs as well.

The objective of this paper is to examine the relationship between innovation and firms’ participation in global value chains (GVCs). To achieve this objective, we use rich firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES), spanning the period of 2006–2017, belonging to 90 countries. Accounting for endogeneity arising from reverse causality, our study finds firm innovation to be a driver of firm GVC participation across countries. These findings are robust to alternative measures of innovation and various sub-sample analysis.