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This paper aims to find and rank the barriers of the four knowledge management (KM) processes including generation, storage, distribution and application in the gas and petroleum sector.

Reviewing the literature of KM and organizational learning, this paper extracted all of the barriers which impede KM processes. Then it designed a questionnaire for validating, ranking and categorizing barriers. Totally, 190 completed questionnaires were gathered from 26 gas and petroleum companies in Iran. Some statistical tests such as T, Friedman, Kruskal–Wallis and Mann–Whitney were used for analyzing data.

Findings reviewed the current literature of KM barriers, validated and ranked the barriers of knowledge generation, storage, distribution and application separately. The importance of knowledge generation and knowledge application barriers were significantly different between gas and petroleum companies. Hence they were disjointedly ranked for gas and petroleum. Finally, KM barriers were ranked according to their contribution to KM processes and the average mean of their importance in KM processes.

From the practical point of view, this paper suggests managers of gas and petroleum companies to emphasize solving high-priority barriers according to the KM process which they are focused on. Furthermore, the study provides a checklist that can be used as an assessment tool for evaluating KM processes considering barriers.

This paper finds the importance of each barrier for each of the four KM processes and ranks the “critical barriers” according to their contribution to four KM processes in the gas and petroleum sector.

Large numbers of women in prison report significant emotional and mental health problems, and there is evidence to suggest that the prison environment may exacerbate the incidence and severity of these issues (Armour, 2012). However, there has been limited exploration of the extent to which women’s mental health problems exist prior to incarceration, whether symptoms first occur in incarceration, and how incarceration affects this. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In-depth interviews were conducted with 43 women incarcerated in three English prisons and a thematic analysis of the data was conducted. Review of official prison records provided a form of data triangulation.

Analysis of the data revealed that while many women who experienced mental health issues in prison had experienced these issues in the past, a number of women reported first experiencing mental health and emotional problems only after entering prison. Although these problems often recede, this demonstrates the significant impact that entering prison can have upon the mental health of women. Unusually, the data highlighted many positive experiences of support within prison. However, there was some lack of consistency in the treatment and support offered to women.

The data presented here are in many ways more positive than previous research and – as opposed to much of the existing literature that simply states the prevalence women’s issues in prison – provides insight into the lived experiences of women in prison. This paper documents how prison can present an opportunity for women to engage with treatment, but there is a need for a clearer understanding of women’s needs and consistent and appropriate support.

This chapter seeks to analyze the development across the length and breadth of the Indian financial system in the post-reform period, based on the “flow of funds” accounts estimates by RBI. Besides, this chapter also analyzes the integration of the Indian capital market with the stock markets of the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore using the movements in their stock prices during 1998–2015. Moreover, this chapter is intended for examining the potential implication financial integration, particularly the financial openness of India, on volatility spillover and financial contagion in as much as these two issues have emphatic significance in the determination of the relevant policy roadmap. Our findings broadly confirms the expectations by revealing significantly positive correlations in stock prices, in returns to investments in stock markets, and in mean returns and risk. The integration of the capital markets is also manifested in the cyclical fluctuations of the stock price indices, signifying the underlying sensitivity to random shocks.

This chapter elaborates on the perspectives of financial development of countries of Central Asia and China through cooperation with Russia. The authors determine financial resources for the development of the countries of Central Asia and China and figure out possible scenarios for attracting additional financial resources and conclude that financial resources have a decisive role in socioeconomic development. It is substantiated that the increase and expansion of cooperation with Russia are the preferable scenario for attracting additional financial resources. The authors recommend expanding cooperation with Russia within the implementation of the selected optimal scenario are given.

Trade war among the nations dates back mainly to the nineteenth century. Some of the trade wars may be cited as (i) The First and Second Opium War Empire between 1839 and 1842; (ii) The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, 1930 signed by US President Herbert Hoover; (iii) Chicken wars in the early 1960s; (iv) The US–Japan automobile trade war in the 1980s; (v) 1985 Pasta War between America under the Regan Administration of United States and Europe; (vi) The Banana wars. However, trade becomes more intense in the present century with the increase of the economic trade instruments. Under the Obama Administration, currency war and tariff war both became strong between the United States and China with intense effect over the globe. After the Obama regime, came Donald John Trump with a number of controversial (aggressive) trade protectionism plans saying thereby “China’s accession to the World Trade Organization has enabled the greatest jobs theft in history” and “Trillions of our dollars and millions of our jobs flowed overseas as a result.” Even during the COVID-19 period in the 2020s, threats and counter-threats have been on the ascend. It is in this backdrop the present chapter mainly traces the history of trade wars in the twenty-first century, touching upon the nineteenth and twentieth century trade battles.

Achieving Sustainable Developments Goals (SDGs) is main agenda of any democratic government. The demand for needs of the society is increasing day by day due to increasing globalization and rapid transformation in all spheres of the society, and as a result, agriculture has shifted from a situation where food is primarily considered as a national concern with high self-sufficiency goals to a situation, where food can be traded subject to high degree of vertical integration of value chain. This study attempts to examine first, how far the state Tripura has developed toward to achieving its SDGs; so that Central dependency of the state would be reduced; second, the impact of globalization on its sustainable development; and, third, the possibility of development in different sectors of the economy toward fulfilling the SDGs through globalization. It observes that the state is in the take-off stage; it needs to go long way to make it developed. The state has lot of potentialities for its sustainable development.

The US–China conflicts surrounding the imposition of tariffs have caused a stir in the global markets. Various attempts have been made to understand the rationale and causes as well as its impact on the various ­aspects of the international market. There are many unanswered questions pertaining to China’s emergence as a global superpower and the ­possible threats that it poses to the Western dominated market. Based on this background, the chapter is an attempt to investigate the impacts of the Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) of the United States and China on three most important global markets, namely, crude oil, credit market, and commodity ­market. To attain the objectives of the chapter, the study has utilized Vector Auto Regressive model and has analyzed the results. The study concludes that China’s EPU has lesser impact on the global market as compared to the US EPU. On the basis of the results obtained, few policy implications have been proposed.

Following the financial crisis, across the Western world, defense budgets have undergone substantial and far-reaching cuts. But in the emerging markets there has been a significant rise in defense expenditure (DE). Countries such as China, Brazil, and India have doubled or even tripled their defense spending during the past two decades. It has been generally argued that terrorism can potentially affect economic growth adversely in the short run through a number of channels. Terrorist attacks can increase uncertainty which limits the scope for domestic investments and also diverts foreign direct investment. In order to mitigate terrorism, increased government spending on security can crowd out more growth-enhancing public and private investments in social sectors such as health and education, which in turn may affect the long run growth of a nation. Terrorism also hinders growth by raising the cost of doing business in terms of higher wages, larger insurance premiums, and greater security expenditures. These higher costs result in reduced profits and, thus, smaller return on investment. Terrorist attacks can also destroy infrastructure, thereby leading to business disruptions. This study attempts to examine both the short- (SR) and long-run (LR) associations among terrorism, DE, and its impact on GDP taking time series evidence, using autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) model from some selected countries of Asia – India, China, Bangladesh, and Pakistan – during 1990 to 2014. The results show that there are LR associations among the three variables for Pakistan only.

Cybersecurity and data protection concerns have gained notoriety in past years intensified by the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica “scandal” in early 2018, which exposed millions of individual data. This case revealed that both regulatory measures and data protection mechanisms were, and still are, insufficient, with several countries reforming or promulgating new legislation. The Article 19 EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) contains controversial extra-territorial provisions, which might violate State Sovereignty principles. It is still unknown how the GDPR will be implemented. This chapter reveals data protection as an Ethics discipline, considering that it is a fundamental right of individuals to share or not to share data, vis-á-vis the rights to have the personal data well-protected. The empirical research will be developed based on the need to build up a concept of Responsible Entrepreneurship in the technology sector, applied to cross-border e-commerce. The Digital Silk Road is the case study selected since it represents a complex international cooperation initiative done without institutionalization yet with eminent data surveillance concerns when building network infrastructure and satellite navigation systems.

Of late, the ongoing trade war between the two most powerful economies of the world – United States and China – has placed both the countries on a horrid front, breaking the world’s most important bilateral relationship of the twenty-first century. Their failure to reach a concrete agreement on mutual benefit on matters related to growing hefty amount of China’s current account surplus of balance of payments (BoP) and endangering United States to create jobs on its side, China’s use of illegal and unfair methods to acquire rights on intellectual property and US technology at an effectively discounted price; and also the concern that China by hook or by crook seeks to weaken the US economy has made matters worse. It is in this context the chapter analyzes the trade tensions between them and the context under which it came to the fore and with what outcomes. The analysis recommends interventions of the global leaders to mitigate the issues for the betterment of the world economy.