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1. Introduction
Despite its significant contribution to the GDP of the global economy (Obi et al., 2018) and serving the role as a sector absorbing workforce (Ghergina et al., 2020), small and medium enterprises (SMEs) owing to its various limitations such as limited human resources, financial and technological know-how (Smith and Wakins, 2012; Wosche et al., 2017) are vulnerable to the impact of business crisis (Grondys et al., 2021). In line with the vulnerability of the SMEs operation against the impact of business risks (Verano and Venturini, 2013; Vladic, 2015), creating an improved risk evaluation methodology suitable for the SMEs is believed to increase their business sustainability. Properly managing the impact of business risks has a positive relationship with improved enterprises' financial performance and sustainability (Singh and Hong, 2020; Shahin et al., 2019). Similar to big enterprises, SMEs are nowadays also under pressure to implement approaches considering sustainability in running their business operation (Fetter, 2019). Within supply chain management, assessing the impact of business risks will enable decision-makers to take appropriate countermeasures to prevent business losses, which, in turn, will improve business performance (Dias et al., 2020).
Among research streams in supply chain management, investigative effort to improve understanding of better managing sustainability risks is one of the growing research areas (Fagundes et al., 2020). Nevertheless, studies discussing the advancement of supply chain risk management as reported by Ceryno et al. (2013), Ho et al. (2015), Fan and Stevenson (2018), Bak (2018), Fagundes et al. (2020) and Nakano and Lau (2020) are silent on reporting empirical studies on accessing supply chain sustainability risks of SMEs. On the other side, among studies reporting on the progress of advancement of supply chain risk assessment tools as reported in the work of Tran et al. (2018), Vishnu et al. (2019) and Lima et al. (2020) are also overlooking empirical research attention to SMEs despite their admittance on the importance of managing supply chain risks in their context. Our perusal of the aforementioned supply chain risk assessment studies indicates some limitations as follows:
Attention to the risk decision-making process is largely devoted to the large enterprises and the typical risks evaluated tend to focus on operational-type risks. Research efforts intended to evaluate...