Industry 4.0 and production recovery in the covid era
基于2622家意大利中小制造企业的调查数据，研究发现对工业4.0的开放程度（采用技术数量）能显著促进企业感知的生产恢复，且数字重组加速短期恢复，经典重组则助力中期恢复。
This study aims to use a quantitative analysis to explore the effects of openness to Industry 4.0 on the perceived production recovery post the COVID-19 pandemic, mediated by digital and classical reorganization. Openness to Industry 4.0 is measured by the breadth of the number of technologies adopted. The production recovery is measured by the perception of firms that a return to pre-COVID-19 production levels will happen within either 2021, 2022, or 2023. The study takes a representative sample of 2622 manufacturing small and medium enterprises across Italy (surveyed between October and November 2020) through a mediation analysis based on nonlinear probability models (KHB method). The results of the models show the following. First, openness to Industry 4.0 has a positive and significant direct effect on a perceived production recovery in the short term (within 2021) and medium term (within 2022 and 2023). Further, this effect is accelerated in the short term by digital reorganization and in the medium term by the addition of a classical reorganization. The research provides relevant managerial implications based on a large sample of current empirical data, showing that Industry 4.0 technologies, when adopted in tandem with the digital reorganization of production activity, can accelerate production recovery to pre-COVID-19 levels.