Do Industry Forces Affect Small and Medium Enterprise’s Investment in Downstream Oil and Gas Sector? Empirical Evidence from Ghana

There is the need to reexamine the nexus between industry forces and investment behavior due to mixed and ambiguous results in most previous studies. The purpose of this study is to investigate how the antecedents of industry forces affect investment behavior of Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Ghana’s downstream oil and gas sector. The SMEs manager’s perceived benefits of oil and gas trade have also been examined. A cross sectional survey methodology has been used to collect data from 475 Ghanaian SMEs via structured questionnaire. Data have been analyzed using partial least square method. Using exploratory factor analysis and multiple regression analysis our results reveal that threat of entry, competitive rivalry, power of suppliers and power of buyers are related to SMEs investment behavior. We find insufficient empirical evidence to support the relationship between threat of substitutes and investment behavior. Our substantive evidence further show that SMEs managers/owners have high expectation from the oil and gas trade notably: High earnings, employment opportunities, improvement in infrastructure and service extension to Ghanaians. Our robust results are partially consistent with Porters’ five forces model. These results have important implication on oil and gas investment and industrial restructuring to facilitate SMEs participation in the sector.