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Small and Medium Manufacturing Enterprises have emerged to play a crucial part in the context of industrialization and globalization, despite fierce competition and rapid change. However, in the extant studies, what drives Southeast Asia enterprises to reconfigure themselves and how well they cope with external challenges remains to be determined. Therefore, this research investigates structural reconfiguration as dynamic capabilities and conducts an empirical study for small and medium manufacturing firms in Southeast Asia. The World Bank Enterprise Survey, conducted between 2014 and 2016, collected information from 1,184 manufacturing firms used in the research on structural reconfiguration. The hierarchical regression model helps to create prediction equations to test structural reconfiguration as the mediators of organizational efficiency and business environment on firm performance. The findings demonstrate how structural reconfiguration is influenced by organizational efficiency and business obstacles. Furthermore, labor efficiency and competitive obstacles provide the most significant moderating effect on structural reconfiguration through dissolution. Finally, structural recombination has the potential to improve firm performance through direct and indirect impacts.

While entrepreneurship has been extensively studied worldwide, scant empirical research evidence has been found in Vietnam. Building upon the institutional economics perspective, this study empirically investigates the tripartite relationship between formal institutions, entrepreneurial activity, and socio-economic outcomes. A fixed effects model is employed to test the proposed hypotheses using a 5-year strong balanced panel data. The findings indicate that provinces are heterogeneous along multiple dimensions of institutional quality, leading to different entrepreneurial rates. Concurrently, it highlights the vital role of entrepreneurial activity in explaining the differences in economic performance, unemployment rate, and living standards across Vietnam’s regions. The results also confirm that the entrepreneurial rate exerts a mediating effect on the relationship between institutional quality and socio-economic outcomes. This study contributes to the entrepreneurial literature in Vietnam and provides practical implications for Vietnamese policymakers.

The purpose of this study is to examine the direct and moderating effects of internal endowment and external dynamism on capability reconfiguration, which in turn has a positive impact on a firm’s post-reconfiguration performance. A researcher-designed survey questionnaire was developed based on multiple works and subsequently administered with a final sample of 266 Vietnamese small and medium enterprises engaged in manufacturing industries. As a result, we find that internal endowment and external dynamism positively impact a firm’s capability reconfiguration and post-reconfiguration performance consequently. This empirical research provides four major contributions that supplement the extant literature. First, the internal endowment sponsored by resource abundance and absorptive capacity enables both a firm’s capability evolution and capability substitution. Second, the external dynamism in terms of market turbulence, technology turbulence, and competitive intensity directly affects the enterprise’s capability reconfiguration and positively moderates the relationship between internal endowment and capability reconfiguration. Third, this study demonstrates that the firm’s engagement on capability reconfiguration once in line with external and internal factors can help maintain its post-reconfiguration performance. Finally, the primary data collected in Vietnam offers a firsthand investigation of the catching-up economy to be compared with the research findings available in developed countries.