India had broken all the records and counts of confirmed COVID-19 cases per day and daily death toll reached over thousands. India is way far from other developed nations in the number of vaccine doses per 100 population. Although vaccination is an effective measure to be followed to overcome this grave situation, still certain misconceptions and rumors throughout the country have pulled a decent part of the population from being vaccinated. Another big challenge is production and supply of vaccines to meet the demand. COVID-19 pandemic will not end until the entire population gets vaccinated that would protect them from this deadly disease. Therefore, this paper aims at clearly identifying the factors and subsequently prioritizing them as barriers in effective immunization against COVID-19 in India following multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) technique. In this study, a fuzzy decision-making trail and evaluation laboratory (F-DEMATEL) approach is applied for understanding the contextual relationship among the barriers for effective immunization against COVID-19. The methodology is followed in a fuzzy environment to address the issue of uncertainty in the data gathered. The result suggests that the ‘Misinformation/ Misconceptions/ Lack of vaccine education in underserved communities’, ‘Lack of information regarding a vaccination center close to home’, ‘Difficulties in getting appointments’, ‘Supply chain issues in the distribution of vaccine’, and ‘Lack of access for marginalized communities’ are the important barriers in effective immunization against COVID-19. Recommendations have been made to overcome this situation and help to immunize the population and drag COVID-19 down to earth.

This research aims at exploring barriers of adopting Industry 4.0 in manufacturing supply chains. Data were collected based on a review of extant literature on barriers Industry 4.0 adoption, individual interviews with a panel consisted of academic and industry experts. Following numerous previous studies, interpretive structural modeling (ISM) and matrix multiplication applied to classification (MICMAC) analysis were conducted to order 10 barriers based on their importance and impacts. The results excluded one barrier “cyber security challenges”, categorized another one as a dependent barrier “lack of digital strategy”, and eight barriers as linkage barriers “lack of infrastructure”, “personnel resistance to adopt new technologies”, “high investment requirements”, “data management and quality challenges”, “uncertainty of economic benefits”, “low maturity level of technology”, “lack of adequate skills”, and “job disruptions”. Henceforward, it was concluded that mitigating these eight barriers is very critical to ensure a successful adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies in supply chains. Further studies are required to categorize these eight barriers based on their importance and relationships.

E-commerce can optimize the communications between producers, distributors, consumers, and even policy makers. However, due to many reasons, the application of e-commerce by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in developing economies is still limited. This study focuses on determining the determinants of the application of E-commerce model in SMEs in Ho Chi Minh City. Then, some policy implications are proposed to promote e-commerce model in SMEs in Ho Chi Minh City. Based on the survey of 302 SMEs in Ho Chi Minh City, the paper has employed statistical methods, assessing the reliability by Cronbach's Alpha scale, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), correlation analysis as well as linear regression model (OLS) for analysis. The results show that the enterprise's readiness, awareness of benefits of e-commerce and supporting policies positively affect the application of E-commerce. E-commerce adoption barriers negatively affect E-commerce applications of SMEs in Ho Chi Minh City.

The COVID-19 outbreak has illustrated the wide range of issues that supply networks confront when they are subjected to major interruptions. The supply networks for vaccines are no exception. To get out of this pandemic, it's critical to identify and address problems with the COVID-19 vaccine supply chain (VSC). This work identifies 13 challenges and prioritizes those. The findings provide stakeholders and government policymakers with realistic advice for developing a better VSC. This paper proposes a methodology based on fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (Fuzzy-AHP) with the use of triangular fuzzy numbers for prioritizing VSC barriers. It has been found that the impact of poor health worker training facilities becomes maximum with the highest weightage. Moreover, the managerial implication of the results is also provided, which will be useful for VSC sectors to take suitable decisions to overcome these obstacles.

This study investigates the impact of internationalization barriers on the export performance of Jordanian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The aim of this study is to investigate how the export performance of SMEs in the furniture industry is influenced by external and internal barriers and what significance these have for international performance. Based on a quantitative research design, data was collected from 318 small and medium-sized Jordanian companies through a survey. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) examined the impact of external barriers, including political, economic, legal and socio-cultural challenges, as well as internal barriers, such as financial, management and market-related barriers, on export performance. However, most barriers - whether internal or external - are domestic and have a greater impact on export performance than barriers from abroad. This study enriches RBV theory in relation to the internationalization of small and medium-sized enterprises by providing evidence that firm-specific resources and capabilities are key factors for SMEs both when they face export barriers and when they achieve better performance in foreign activities. The findings provide practical implications for managers, policy makers and practitioners interested in the internationalization of Jordanian SMEs. An important limitation is the cross-sectional design, one-country context, and self-report in survey research. Future studies are recommended to use a longitudinal design, mediating and moderating mechanisms. This study is innovative as it involves a combined investigation of firm-external and firm-internal export barriers and their effects on the internationalization success of Jordanian SMEs.

Global competition in the marketing has led organizations to be more responsive and efficient to the customers’ needs through quick-new product development and minimized delivery time. Customer satisfaction becomes the major issue for organizations; therefore organizations focus more and more on the collaborative supply chain. Thus, supply chain collaboration has become a major success factor for the organizations to achieve their corporate goals. The current research study is an attempt to address the supply chain collaboration through a systematic literature review. In findings, various specific areas have been examined to understand the necessity, evolution, issues and challenges, types, drivers, benefits, and barriers in the context of supply chain collaboration. Further, the research gap and future agenda have been derived which is very helpful for academics and practitioners to understand supply chain collaboration, gaps in the literature, and future agenda about the supply chain collaboration.

This study presents an empirical investigation to study the post-war tourism in sought west region of Iran. This region is the host of many Iranian who wish remember the events of War between Iran and Iraq. Many high school or university students travel to the region through cultural as well as religious communities. This paper tries to analyze the challenges facing these people when they travel to province of Khozestan, Iran. The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among some randomly selected people who visited the region. The implementation of Pearson correlation test has determined that “Weakness of tourism infrastructure facilities and services” is to be blamed the most followed by “Underdevelopment of decision making centers”. Moreover, path analysis has been implemented to detect direct and indirect effects of different factors on development of tourism in the region. In our survey, marketing, culture and weakness in infrastructures have been determined the most important factors influencing on development of the region.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to detect major barriers on developing nano technology in Islamic Azad University. The proposed study selects south Tehran branch as a pilot study, designs a questionnaire and distributes it among all 80 employees who work for this university. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.93, which is well above the minimum acceptable level. The study has executed the study in five different areas including financial resources, physical equipment, training and empowering human resources, organizational culture and outside organizational factors. The study has determined that physical equipment is number one priority followed by financial resources and training as well as empowering employees.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to find the important factors influencing implementation of knowledge management in revenue agencies in Iran. The proposed study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among some experts and, using principal component analysis, the study detects important barriers for knowledge management implications. The study selects 170 people from 880 regular employees who work for revenue agency and distributes the questionnaire designed in Likert scale. Cronbach alpha has been determined as 0.70, which is well above the minimum acceptable level. In terms of knowledge management, the study determines six factors including support for creativity and innovation, knowledge sharing, trust, employee promotion plan, mission and training programs and they represent 66.57% of the described factors. In addition, in terms of barriers, job security, cultural issues, individual differences, infrastructure, organizational structure and lack of vision are the most important issues representing 61.98% of the factors.

During the past few years, stock exchange investors confront numerous problems in terms of legal, environmental issues, etc. In this paper, we present an empirical study to detect important issues as barriers for investment in Tehran Stock Exchange. The study has categorized the issues into two groups of real world and legal issues. Since there are different issues involved as major barriers, the study uses analytical hierarchy process to rank them. The study extracts 18 important factors, which influence investors’ participation in Tehran Stock Exchange and using Borda method, prioritize them. The results of the survey indicate that in terms of real issues, Increase in quality of firms Financial Statement is number one priority followed by Increase stock exchange and agents’ proficiency and electronic equipment, Unchangeable investment market rules and bounding organization managers to flow them and Strict supervision on agents’ activities. In terms of legal issues, good supervision of provisions to force firms to reveal information correctly and restrict their secret bargaining is the most important factor followed by Using indirect investment guideline instead of direct investment, Increase in quality of firms’ Financial Statement and Investors’ training toward their rights.