Do business strategies affect firms' survival during the COVID-19 pandemic? A global perspective

Purpose This study examines the survival probability of the firms during the COVID-19 pandemic and identifies the effects of pandemic-era business strategies on firm survival across sectors and sizes. Design/methodology/approach This study combines World Bank Enterprise Survey data with three consecutive follow-up COVID-19 survey data. The COVID-19 surveys are the follow-up surveys of WBES, and they are done at different points of time during the pandemic. Both WBES and COVID-19 surveys follow the same sampling methods, and the data are merged based on the unique id number of the firms. The data covers 12,551 firms from 21 countries in different regions such as Africa, Latin America, Central Asia and the Middle East. The study applies Kaplan–Meier estimate to analyze the…