Small business sustainability and regional development: Lessons learnt from sectoral changes in China and the Czech Republic
Small business sustainability and regional development: Lessons learnt from sectoral changes in China and the Czech Republic

Summary/Abstract: Changes in regional policy could affect the development and sustainabilityof small businesses, which react to external conditions. Themain goal of this paper is to propose a regional system of indicatorsof an assessment of the business environment. The proposed systemof indicators reflects the specifics of regions that have undergonesectoral change. The structure of the paper follows a top-down approach,first describing the national and then the regional context ofthe chosen, somewhat similar, regions within the selected countries.The paper first describes current analytical results from an overall nationalevaluation of two different countries (Czechia and China) withselected structurally changed regions. Lastly, it proposes a systemof indicators. The systematic part of the paper contains a practicalcase study from one Czech region to illustrate the examined problemsand how to connect business needs with regional policy issues.According to the findings, when an entrepreneur is in daily contactwith the local government, the quality of the business environment isvery important for each of them to exploit a comparative advantagefrom the market. Proposals are based on a field survey study of 215entrepreneurs, conducted in the selected Moravian-Silesian regionthat has undergone sectoral change similar to Shanxi Province today.The results could be applicable as an example of good practice bymeans of which to evaluate other regions in the same situation.

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