From Access to Advantage: A Resource-Orchestration Framework of Digital Financial Literacy, Government Support and Small-Enterprise Performance

Finance, Financial Inclusion, Digital Financial Literacy, Management and Entrepreneurship

Why do two small enterprises with the same smartphone, the same payment app and the same bank account end up with very different results? This paper takes that question seriously from a management perspective while keeping an economist's eye on cost, information and institutions. Using a purposive, open-access review of peer-reviewed work on digital finance and micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), supported by a close reading of one recent partial-least-squares study of 260 Indonesian food enterprises, we argue that digital financial inclusion behaves less like a resource and more like a capability: it is the means by which an owner's knowledge and the state's programmes are converted into revenue stability, efficiency and customer loyalty. Re-examining the published path coefficients, we show that government support is the larger direct correlate of performance, while owner literacy works relatively more through actual use of digital services. We then propose a resource-orchestration framework with two moderators, owner age and digital readiness, and local institutional quality, and we state six hypotheses together with a complete research-design blueprint that doctoral researchers in management or economics can adopt. The paper is conceptual and contains no new survey data.

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