The Risk Management For SMEs: Literature Review And Research Agenda

Nowadays the implementation of RM in enterprises has become compulsory to ensure a constant and stable growth without incurring unforeseen risks that could consequently bring about increased costs or, at worst, the firm's bankruptcy. If this is true for corporations it is even more so for small and medium enterprises that notably have fewer financial instruments at their disposal as opposed to large enterprises. In this work, the objective has been to analyse the studies conducted on risk management applied to small and medium enterprises in order to obtain, first, the quantitative evidence of the interest paid to this topic. And second, after a multi-objective classification has been performed, to highlight the different aspects of the literature by risk type, sector of application, RM stream, RM process phase and research type. From these data the risk stream and the risk type have been extracted and then crossed to find the main gaps which concern the Insurance Risk Management Stream and the Hazard Risks type. The proposal for the research agenda will be that of developing an analysis about the two main gaps highlighted and furthermore to suggest some instruments for the treatment of risk.