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This paper aims to investigate the difference between the impacts of indicators of trade barriers (TBs) on bankrupt enterprises (BEs), new enterprises (NEs) and other enterprises (OEs).

The paper has used a multiple-step approach. At the first stage, the initial data has been collected from interviews with 164 top managers of SMEs in West Azerbaijan in Iran during two periods of 2013–2015 and 2017–2019. At the second step, multiple correspondence analysis has been used to summarize the relationships between variables and construct indices for different groups of TBs. Finally, the generalized structural equation model method was used to examine the impact of export barriers.

The results showed that the political legal index is the main TBs for BEs and NEs, but it had a more significant impact on BEs; the financial index was the second major TBs factor for BEs, while OEs did not have a problem in performance index, and the financial index was classified as a minor obstacle for them. All indicators of marketing barriers (except production index) had a negative and significant effect on all enterprises; the most important TBs for NEs was the information index.

The results indicated that if enterprises have a strong financial system and function, they can lessen the impact of sanctions and keep themselves in the market.

This study aims to examine the effect of usage, value, tradition, risk, compatibility and complexity barriers on user resistance to mobile bookkeeping applications. Furthermore, it also explores how the relationship between these barriers and user resistance is mediated by technostress. Finally, the authors analysed the moderating impact of self-efficacy on the mediating effect of technostress between barriers and user resistance.

Structured questionnaires were used to obtain data from 325 respondents. A structural equation modelling technique was used to investigate the hypotheses.

The findings suggest that usage, risk and tradition barrier has a significantly positive effect on user resistance intention. Also, results suggested that technostress plays an important role in framing customers’ resistance intention. Finally, the mediation effect of technostress between risk barrier and user resistance is higher for users having low levels of self-efficacy compared with users with high levels of self-efficacy.

The present research enriches the existing literature, especially in the field of mobile bookkeeping applications, user resistance, technostress and innovation resistance theory. It would help bookkeeping application developers design their apps, keeping the major user barriers in mind.

Amid the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), supply chains have faltered. This has influenced operational and financial performance and lead to uncertainty in supply and distribution. Therefore, systems measuring supply chain risk and disruption management performance have gained interest. This study explores barriers to supply chain performance measurement during disruptions such as COVID-19.

Based on a survey and literature review, the authors formalise the barriers and rank them using the Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) fuzzy Višekriterijumsko kompromisno rangiranje (VIKOR) methodology. A total of 14 experts in 11 countries were surveyed. Performance measurement is based on a balanced scorecard.

Fifteen barriers are identified. Based on DEMATEL analysis, the cause–effect relationships among the four scorecard aspects are explored. The customer axis is revealed as the cause, while the financial, internal business and learning/development are identified as the effect of the supply chain performance measurement. Fuzzy VIKOR calculations show that uncertainty of investment, disrupted cash flows and the bullwhip effect are the most critical barriers to measure supply chain performance during outbreaks such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study identifies and ranks general barriers; additional research is required to differentiate barriers in specific industrial sectors.

The findings may help develop proactive, resilient supply chain performance strategies to overcome disruptions.

Policy-makers and decision-makers in industrial and service firms can explore these findings to inform strategies for robust supply chains that can resist disruption in risky environments.

This research addresses a knowledge gap in barriers to measure supply chain performance in post-pandemic areas. It is unclear how far firms will measure supply chain performance in terms of learning from disruption patterns, managing financial and customer demand processes in light of COVID-19. This study contributes by explaining the influences among the barriers and exploring them, offering insights from multiple stakeholders.

This study aims to identify the barriers to building supply chain resilience and assess the contextual relationship between them in the Indian micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME) sector for the post COVID-19 era.

Barriers to supply chain resilience were extracted from the extant literature and were evaluated using the grey sets and Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) approach from strategic, tactical and operational business perspectives. The responses from experts on the identified barriers were collected through a structured questionnaire. The prominence-net effect results obtained after the DEMATEL application helped identify the most prominent barriers, their net cause and effect, and their correlation with each other.

A total of 16 barriers to resilience, identified from the literature, were considered for analysis. The findings of the study revealed that the lack of flexibility is the most critical causal barrier to building a resilient supply chain. Lack of planned resource management was also found to be an influential barrier. The study also identified the supply chain design, need for collaboration and technological capability as important factors for the MSME sector to focus on.

The study is limited to assessing barriers to the supply chain resilience of MSMEs in India. More extensive research may be needed to reveal the global trend.

The study is significantly important for the MSMEs looking to establish resilient supply chains. Managers can use the findings to identify the weak links in the supply chain for strategic and tactical planning and can take corrective actions.

The study pinpoints the key linkages between barriers that impede MSMEs to make their supply chains resilient and robust to mitigate the impact of future disruptions and adversities. The work may be used by practitioners to further their attention on the significant challenges.

As an emerging technology, Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) and blockchain have the potential to disrupt many areas of business and social structure. However, it is loaded with significant technical, social, legal, financial and ethical complications that bring difficulty in its widespread use within the public distribution system (PDS). This research aims to analyze the barriers to integrated RFID and blockchain adoption in developing countries' PDS. Furthermore, this study also aims to validate the proposed framework against the Indian PDS.

The proposed framework consists of 10 potential barriers to integrated RFID and blockchain adoption. To identify the barriers, this study referred to the extant literature followed by consultations with domain experts. This study prepared the DEMATEL-based questionnaires, collected the data from four domain experts and analyzed them using an integrated Grey-DEMATEL approach.

The obtained results provide a precise list of barriers and the correlations among them. From the results, it is concluded that the unavailability of a skilled workforce at affordable cost, lack of knowledge about privacy level and unclear return on investment and benefits are the most critical blockchain adoption barriers in the context of Indian PDS.

This research proposes a framework consisting of 10 integrated RFID and blockchain adoption barriers in relation to Indian PDS. It also proposes a method for analyzing causal interrelationships between the barriers while allowing for data input from domain experts. Consequently, the framework is capable of coping with experts' biases and data scarcity.

The European Union's Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), which is already one of the EU's most impactful instruments for reducing greenhouse gases (GHGs), will soon include the maritime transport industry. Although ports are this industry's most environmental-friendly component, there are still some barriers to including ports in the system. Therefore, the purpose of the study is to identify these barriers and to reveal the barriers' interrelationships.

The study was conducted by identifying barriers from a literature review before analyzing the barriers with the Fuzzy DEMATEL method. Finally, based on the Complex Adaptive System Approach, various solutions are proposed to overcome these barriers.

The identified barriers were grouped into cause-and-effect groups. Two barriers, namely long payback period and high investment costs, were evaluated as triggers of the model while the others were more sensitive to the model.

This study only includes the perceptions of green certificated ports in Türkiye. The results revealed an expectation that elimination of financial concerns will alleviate other barriers to including ports in the system. The study's findings can guide port managers on the integration of the managers' processes into the system.

This study provides novel findings regarding the relationships between barriers hindering ports from involvement in the EU ETS.

Rapid innovation and developments in personal electronic technology have encouraged users to change users' devices more frequently than ever, which has resulted in creating a massive increase in the amount of electronic waste. The study focuses on identifying the barriers to closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) in the electronic industry.

A framework for analyzing the relationships among CLSC adoption barriers is designed. The authors adopted the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) technique to determine the critical barriers of electronic CLSC from the opinion of experts in the field.

The outcome from the analysis suggests that cost barriers, financial barrier, process barriers and supplier-side barriers are the main causal factors that prevent the adoption and implementation of e-waste CLSC. The causal relationship indicates that financial barrier is the most influential factor, while phycological barrier is the most flexible barrier to the adoption of e-waste CLSC.

This study is restricted to CLSC adoption barriers in the electronic industry by evaluating 36 sub-barriers grouped into 8 main dimensions related to different members of the supply chain.

Closed-loop adoption barriers have been proposed to understand the crucial barriers to implementation of CLSC in the electronic industry. The cause-and-effect relationship indicates the critical factors to be improved to increase adoption of e-waste CLSC, helping managers and regulatory bodies to mitigate the problem areas.

This study contributes to the literature on CLSC by adopting a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) technique which captures the critical barriers of e-waste CLSC adoption in Indian scenario.

Recently, increasing costs and competitive pressure have accelerated the search for different business models in both the production and service sectors. The rapid development of technology has increased the importance of digitalization, especially in developing new and different strategies. The digital service business model has also become a new business model that companies have recently preferred. In addition to its many advantages, it is a business model in which different barriers arise in practice. When we look at the literature, there are very few studies, especially on digital servitization. The purpose of this study is to integrate the concept of digital servitization with the Industry 4.0 perspective.

To achieve this aim, first, the authors identify various challenges and barriers in front of digital servitization based on the Industry 4.0 perspective. Later, they determine the relative importance of these barriers critical to the success of digital servitization. Lastly, one multi-criteria decision-making method, the fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory method, is used to analyze the cause-and-effect relationship between each barrier based on the Industry 4.0 perspective

Based on the results, the most crucial cause-and-effect barriers are insufficient infrastructure/lack of IT infrastructure and high implementation, respectively. Therefore, this study offers the reader the possible barriers to sustainable digital servitization with Industry 4.0 perspective implementations and comprehensive solutions for these barriers. In addition, this study draws a roadmap for disseminating digital service applications.

There is no study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, about determining barriers and problems with merging digital servitization with the Industry 4.0 perspective. So, there is still a significant gap in the literature about investigating these two essential topics from the Industry 4.0 perspective.

This study examines the interconnected effects of formal, informal, environmental and skill-based institutional barriers on firm performance. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) region has implemented various reforms and policy initiatives to support small businesses yet are unsuccessful as formal institutional framework and governance remains a challenge.

The authors employ a sample of 3,515 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) from the ECOWAS and a two-stage instrumental variable approach to control for endogeneity. Additionally, the authors check for robustness using various measures of firm performance such as profitability, productivity and export intensity.

The authors confirm that formal institutions are insignificant for firm profitability and productivity, whilst reducing informal, environmental and skill-based institutional barriers are associated with firm performance. However, when barriers to informal, environmental and skill-based institutions are at the lowest, formal institutions are associated with firm performance.

The major limitation lies in the policy implications. Informal institutions come into play when formal institutions are weak. However, informal practices must be addressed in the form of formal enforcement. This leads to a conundrum.

Policymakers should continue to market-supporting institutions and a conducive business environment to complement the formal institutional framework.

This study provides new empirical evidence on how institutional quality affects firm performance by examining whether other institutional factors, such as the informal, environmental and skill-based institutional barriers, can moderate this effect.

The present study aims to investigate the relationship between institutional influence and performance, mediated through transformational leadership (TL) and moderated by barriers, situational factors, communication and implementation.

Using a structured survey instrument, data were collected from 370 faculty members from 31 higher educational institutions in southern India. After checking the psychometric properties of the instrument, the authors used Hayes’s PROCESS to test the direct hypotheses and three-way interactions.

The results revealed that TL mediated the relationship between institutional influence and performance. Further, the findings supported the three-way interactions between (1) institutional influence, barriers and communication positively affecting TL; and (2) TL, situational factors and implementation affecting the performance of faculty members.

This study underscores the importance of TL for the smooth functioning of higher educational institutions and achieving superior performance, especially in the new normal context after the global pandemic.

This study makes several significant recommendations to administrators in higher educational institutions, in addition to contributing to the vast literature on TL. The study suggests that administrators must invest resources in developing TL skills so that employees reach their fullest potential and contribute to achieving organizational goals. In addition, leaders in organizations need to exercise a transformational style to combat the new normal post-pandemic academic environment.

This study provides new insights into the importance of TL style and institutional influence to enhance performance. To the best of our knowledge, the conceptual model developed and tested the first of its kind in India, significantly contributing to theory and practice.