Factors Affecting the Performance of Small and Medium Enterprises Regarding the Sustainable Development Goals—The Case of Foreign Direct Investment Firms in Vietnam
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The article submitted for review is interesting and addresses a timely topic, but before publication the authors should consider and complete several problems:
1. the study lacks an explanation of the concept of FDI - foreign direct investment,
2. the study lacks brief information about the scale of foreign direct investment in Vietnam in relation to other investments in SMEs,
3. does the first hypothesis H1 and the second hypothesis H2 refer to foreign direct investment in SMEs in Vietnam?
4 I propose to clarify the first hypothesis H1 and the second hypothesis H2.
Author Response
Dear sir/madam,
Thanks again for your support. I send you the response to the comments in the attached files.
Thank you very much. You suggested the very useful comments. I think your advice make our paper more better. I hope that you feel well with my revised article.
I am looking forward to hearing from you soon.
Best regards,
Author
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Overall the paper presents interesting results about determinants of SMEs' perfomance. However, there are several points, which must be adressed by the authors.
1) Title of the paper is "Factors Affecting Performance of Small and Medium Enterprises for Sustainable Development Goals—The Case of Foreign Direct Investment Firms in Vietnam". Introduction and literature discusses topics, related to sustainability, however analysis results and conclusions does not. It seems that sustainability part is not related to the analysis of operational perfomance part. In addition, it is not clear what do authors mean under SDGs. Are these goals are from UN list of some other goals on enterprise level? How these goals are connected to the standart enterprise financial and operational metrics and etc...
2) Research hypotheses 2 and 3 should state clear relationship, which authors would like to check.
3) table 2 presents descriptive statistics. It seems, that most of the variables have positive assymetry. Therefore, regression results might be affected by precence of severe outliers, since authors have not used natural logs or other lineriarization technics in the model. In addition, debt to total asset ratio is higher than 1, meaning, that company have more debt thantotal assets. It seems not realistic for companies with normal operation processes.
4) Regsults of the regression modelling should be supported by results of tests for general regression checks and results of robustness analysis.
5) Discusion of the results should be added.
Author Response
Dear sir/madam,
Thanks again for your support. I send you the response to the comments in the attached files.
Thank you very much. You suggested the very useful comments. I think your advice make our paper more better. I hope that you feel well with my revised article.
I am looking forward to hearing from you soon.
Best regards,
Author
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The problem of monitoring operational performance of FDI companies is rightly considered as current and significant in developing countries.
There are two key problems undertaken in this paper. The first is economic evaluation of functioning FDI vs domestic SME's in Vietnam. The other research problem is how to achieve SDG's by FDI. In my opinion the first research objective is much more better investigated than the other. This requires some supplementation or limitation of research objectives to reach.
I have also some correction suggestions:
Line 24-25: trivial sentence. Everyone knows that enterprises play imported role in the economy! There is no economy without them.
Line 25-26: "relationship between night-time economy and what...
Line 28: "hospitality" - inappropriate word
Line 197: "Method...Method" - incorrect title
Formula 1: a, b, e parameters are not explained
H2, H3: "can be positive or negative". Hypothesis should be true or false.
OTE-CRS, OTE-VRS and SE formulas should be described clearly in the text.
The Authors should also unify categories used, e.g. "operational efficiency" vs "profitability" which is used instead.
Author Response
Dear sir/madam,
Thanks again for your support. I send you the response to the comments in the attached files.
Thank you very much. You suggested the very useful comments. I think your advice make our paper more better. I hope that you feel well with my revised article.
I am looking forward to hearing from you soon.
Best regards,
Author
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
All my comments were met. Authors have sognificantly improved the paper.
Reviewer 3 Report
The Authors have improved the text according to my suggestions.
