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The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of microfinance on women-owned microenterprises’ (WMEs) performance in Indonesia. It especially observes how financial, human and social capital influences performance of enterprises.

Data were collected from a survey conducted in Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest city, covering more than 100 WMEs. The ordered probit technique is applied to estimate the performance vis-à-vis financial, social and human capital relationships.

This study finds a negative relationship between performance and financial capital, and positive relationships between performance-human capital and performance-social capital. However, with respect to human capital, the level of education has a marginally significant relationship with performance.

Microcredit for the purposes of enhancing business performance might not necessarily be a good idea, if it is unable to generate higher returns. As a business develops, the volume of microcredit should be reduced, and replaced by owners’ own savings and retained profits. Regarding the non-financial factors, it might be useful for policy makers to contemplate providing incentives for spouse involvement in microenterprises run by women, and to consider them in designing credit policies. Group meetings activities should be extended to facilitate members to engage in business-related conversations and to develop social relationships. The ability of loan officers and group leaders to facilitate such conversations appears important.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study provides the first in-depth understanding of the role of microfinance programmes in the case of performance of WMEs in Indonesia, one of the world’s most populous economies.

The purpose of this paper is to address the small, women micro-entrepreneur dominated and heterogeneity limitations of the Atmadja et al. (2016) study. The sample is much larger, includes more men and is more heterogeneous, which allows deeper insights and more meaningful explanation of the relationship between microfinance and microenterprise performance in the case of Indonesia, including the effects of gender, lending scheme and money separation.

This study used a survey of 556 respondents across five microcredit providers in the city of Surabaya using an updated instrument. Ordered probit is used to analyse data.

Microfinance may not matter for microenterprise performance in the case of Indonesia. Additionally, microcredit schemes (individual vs group) and gender may also not matter for performance, but money separation might have some influence.

Non-financial factors such as human capital, spousal involvement, and money separation should be considered as important factors for improving microenterprise business performance in Indonesia, with less focus on microcredit per se.

This study provides further evidence that microfinance may not matter for microenterprise performance in the case of Indonesia, a populous middle income country with a very long history of microfinance.

Digital inequality is considered one of the leading causes of socioeconomic disparities nowadays and a barrier to sustainable development. However, a dearth of empirical research has examined the impact of digital inequality in attaining sustainable development. This study aims to systematically review the scientific publications on the impact of digital inequality in achieving sustainable development.

The preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA, 2020) guidelines were followed to carry out the systematic literature review (SLR) using Scopus, Web of Science, ProQuest and Google Scholar electronic databases. Numerous inclusion/exclusion criteria were employed to obtain the most relevant literature. Finally, 54 articles were included to prepare the final database and qualitative synthesis was performed using 12 variables.

While the findings show that there has been a substantial expansion of scientific publications on the focused area in recent years, there is still a lack of empirical and comparative studies; less focus on the offline benefits of online activities were also demonstrated by the results. Moreover, SDGs 04 and 05 were identified as the predominant goals in the literature. Findings further highlighted the importance of an accurate conceptualization of digital inequality.

In general, this study investigates the level of impact of digital inequality on the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. Moreover, it shows the evolution of scientific publications on digital inequality in terms of its contribution when achieving sustainable development.

A review of literature has documented that accessing formal credit and other banking services has always been a crucial challenge for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The alternative, therefore, tends to be informal channels. However, the credit constraint vis-à-vis informal channel link does not appear to be well documented in the literature. This study aims to investigate whether credit constraints significantly affect the probability of accessing informal credit, as well as the credit values of Vietnamese SMEs.

This study uses a trinary approach and correlated random-effects Probit and Tobit techniques to avoid the incidental coefficients problem.

The results suggest that relative to unconstrained and partially constrained firms, fully constrained firms tend to be more active in the informal credit markets, shown by their higher probability of informal credit access and larger credit values.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first study on Vietnam that takes a different approach to credit constraints and examines their impact on informal credit access. Policy implications arise and are discussed.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-11-2017-0543

The purpose of this pitch research letter (PRL) is to apply the pitching template developed by Faff (2015) to an academic project on boardroom gender diversity and default risk.

The pitching template helps the pitcher to identify the core elements that form the framework of the research project. The PRL encloses a brief background about the pitcher and pitch, followed by a brief commentary on the pitch and personal reflections of the pitcher on the pitch exercise itself.

One of the best aspects of the pitching template is that it forced the researchers to think each item over and over, enabling a synthesis of scattered ideas in a systematic way. Hence, it is strongly recommend learning and applying the pitching template as a tool to refine embryonic research ideas and to track the progress on the research projects.

This PRL is novel as it highlights the worth of performing the pitching exercise (i.e. quality publication), potential adoptability challenge and solutions (i.e. unfamiliarity and training), systematic process of learning the pitching template and application of the “rule of three” in pitching research. Such reflections are believed to be useful for early career researchers (ECRs).