Business recovery: an assessment framework

Abstract

This paper presents a Business Recovery Assessment Framework (BRAF) to help researchers and practitioners design robust, repeatable, and comparable studies of business recovery in various post-disruption contexts. Studies assessing business recovery without adequately considering the research aims, recovery definitions, and indicators can produce misleading findings. The BRAF is composed of a series of steps that guide the decisions that researchers need to make to ensure: (i) that recovery is indeed being measured; (ii) that the indicators of recovery that are selected align with the objectives of the study and the definition of recovery; and, where necessary, (iii) that appropriate comparative control variables are in place. The paper draws on a large dataset of business surveys collected following the earthquakes in Canterbury, New Zealand, on 4 September 2010 and 22 February 2011 to demonstrate the varied conclusions that different recovery indicators can produce and to justify the need for a systematic approach to business recovery assessments.

Reopening businesses after Hurricane Harvey: evidence from a duration model with spatial effects

“…Schrank et al (2013) and Sydnor et al (2017) note that a large number of affected businesses that had returned shortly after Katrina eventually shut down years later. Stevenson et al (2018) also document a wide range of experiences that businesses encountered after they returned to the disaster area. Moreover, a disaster community on the road to full recovery may attract new businesses.…”

“…Identifying what drives post‐disaster business recovery is the subject of intensive research. Tierney (2007), Chang and Rose (2012), Stevenson et al (2018), and Lee (2019) provide reviews of the literature. Business survival can be affected by three fundamental variables, which are broadly related to the vulnerability of businesses to a disaster and their capability to recover from it:…”

The continued operation of businesses after an earthquake: a case study from Lushan County, China

“…A limitation is that businesses that relocated outside of the study area or used alternate means of operation (such as functioning online) were not included in the determination of operating status. Future studies could employ more flexible metrics to measure business recovery, such as profitability or self‐assessed performance (Stevenson et al, 2017), rather than focusing only on the results of opening or closing. This would provide more understanding of changes in the performance of a business on its journey towards recovery.…”

Better resilience evaluation

“…The resilience perspective has also entailed an increasing shift in focus from simple protection of buildings, infrastructure and other assets, towards building adaptive capacity. This changes the concentration of evaluation away from static metrics, such as loss estimation and damage measurement, to dynamic metrics such as measuring the speed at which economic production activities resume [3,12,13]. A focus on adaptive capacity and adaptive management also implies an emphasis on flexibility, continual learning and adjustment, and a concern not only with capacity to respond to system change but also an ability to influence and shape the system itself [14].…”