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Several studies have shown that economic shock and crisis trigger companies to move forward innovatively. This paper aims to compliment this research topic by investigating how SMEs activate their organization resilience to adapt to changes generated by a crisis, with specific focus on how digitalization is used as an opportunity on this road. COVID-19 pandemic provided the context to investigate this situation.

The research approach combines literature review, quantitative data survey and data analysis and modeling using PLS-SEM. The quantitative data survey provided the database for building the structural equation model, exploring the structural relationships between the constructs and testing the hypotheses. Expert discussions contributed to the validation and interpretation of the results.

The model reveals that while organizational resilience has no direct effect on digitalization, combined with available resources, it realizes its indirect impact. Resilient companies require less external financial support to achieve their digitalization goals. The results also confirm that an uncertain environment encourages SMEs to go digital.

Several research studies highlighted the importance of SMEs in recovery from crises. Knowing more about how they can be supported and what capabilities they should develop is essential. This research explores the relationship between organizational resilience, resource availability and digitalization for SMEs in crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, revealing the self-reinforcing effect of organizational resilience and the level of digitalization that was not previously studied.

This study is a pilot study exploring the usefulness and ease of use of a prototype VR PetCPR system and discusses the possibility of using it to facilitate pet healthcare skills acquisition. The designed VR PetCPR training system aims to provide pet healthcare professionals with an inexpensive, accessible and reliable CPR training tool and refine their skills in a controlled and simulated environment.

The study was conducted in a one-day workshop. The workshop consisted of the morning section (Section A) and the afternoon section (Section B). Section A was the knowledge acquisition stage. Section B is the VR PetCPR stage. Trainees were then given 30 min to experience the VR PetCPR set. When trainees were ready, they were required to complete two trials of dog CPR practice. After the practice, trainees completed the questionnaire and reported their attitudes toward VR PetCPR practice.

Overall, trainees held positive attitudes toward the effectiveness and usefulness of the VR PetCPR. After practicing skills via VR CPR, over half of the trainees responded that the system is effective in helping them understand the essential knowledge (e.g. operation status, operation positions, etc.) of performing CPR skills on a 30-pound dog. A significantly positive attitude was reported on trainees’ perceptions toward the ease of use of practicing their chest compression skills with the PetCPR. The positive attitudes significantly outnumbered the negative attitudes on explicit instruction and guidance, accessibility, convenience in practice and straightforward interface.

From data collected from 16 animal hospitals in the United States, Europe and Australia with 709 cases, 147 dogs (28%) and 58 cats (30%) temporarily attained ROSC during CPR, and 14 dogs (3%) and four cats (2%) survived to hospital discharge. Training veterinary CPR techniques and implementing RECOVER guidelines still have a long way to go. However, recent virtual reality simulations for CPR training were mainly designed for human patients CPR (Issleib et al., 2021; Liu et al., 2022; Almousa et al., 2019; Wong et al., 2018). The VR PetCPR remains a missing puzzle in the current VR training designs.

The need to enhance student support is evident in higher education (HE) curricula. In addition to the complications created by the COVID-19 pandemic, the current strategies used in academia are criticised for their lack of appropriate student support in HE. The study focused on the themes under Section 4 of the National Student Survey (NSS): availability to contact tutors, receiving good advice and guidance and availability of good advice. The study aimed to provide recommendations for enhancing academic support by developing drivers that need implementation during course delivery.

A documental analysis and a qualitative survey were adopted for this study. A documental analysis of 334 mid-module reviews (MMRs) from levels three to six students in the built environment (BE) discipline. Critical themes identified from the MMRs were fed forward in developing a questionnaire for academics. A sample of 23 academics, including a Head of school, a Principal lecturer, Subject leads and Lecturers, participated in the questionnaire survey. Content analysis is adopted through questionnaire data to develop drivers to enhance academic support in BE. These drivers are then modelled by interpretive structural modelling (ISM) to identify their correlation to NSS Section 4 themes. A level partition analysis establishes how influential they are in enhancing academic support.

The study identified nine drivers, where two drivers were categorised as fundamental, two as significant, four as important, and one insignificant in enhancing academic support in HE. Module leaders’/tutors’ improving awareness and detailing how academic support is provided were identified as fundamental. Differentiating roles in giving advice and the importance of one-to-one meetings were identified as significant. A level partitioning diagram was developed from the nine drivers to illustrate how these drivers need to be implemented to promote the best practices in academic support in HE.

The identified drivers and their categories can be used to set prioritised guidelines for academics and other educational institutions to improve students’ overall satisfaction.

Novelty from the study will be the developed drivers and the level partitioning diagram to assist academics and academic institutions in successfully integrating academic support into HE curricula.

This chapter aims to analyze and evaluate the economic potential of Chad within the African continent, identify the challenges faced by the country, and propose potential solutions. The authors used a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods. Relevant data is collected from reliable sources such as government reports, international organizations, research institutes, and academic studies, including data on Chad's GDP, trade flows, foreign direct investment (FDI), infrastructure, human capital, and natural resources.

The Republic of Chad is an agrarian country where the prosperity of 55% of the population depends on the development of agriculture, mainly livestock. Although rich in natural resources, Chad is one of the poorest countries in the world. Several investment projects have recently appeared in this country, which will help reduce the population's poverty in the future. The growth rate of Chad's economy lags behind that of the population. Foreign assistance is needed to solve the identified problem. With regard to the investment projects that have become more active this year, it would be unnecessary to be dizzy with success because they are still unable to break the established way of life. The Republic of Chad is situated in Africa and is considered one of the largest countries in the continent. The country has no access to the sea.

With the rise of mandating climate-related disclosures (CRD), this paper aims to investigate how energy and agriculture markets are exposed to climate disclosure risk.

Using the multivariable simultaneous quantile regression and data from 1 January 2017 to 29 February 2024, the authors examine daily and monthly responses of energy and agriculture markets to climate disclosure risk, energy risk, market sentiment, geopolitical risk and economic policy risk. The sample covers the global market, Australia, Canada, European Union (EU), Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, the UK and the USA.

The results show that climate disclosure risk creates both positive and negative shocks in the energy and agriculture markets, and the impacts are asymmetric across quantiles in different economies. The higher the climate disclosure risk, the greater impact of crude oil future on the energy sector in North America (Canada and the USA) and Europe (EU and the UK), but no greater effects in Asia Pacific (Australia, New Zealand and Singapore). The agriculture sector can hedge against economic policy and geopolitical risks, but it is highly exposed to climate disclosure and energy risks.

This study timely contributes to the modest literature on the asymmetric effects of climate disclosure risk on the energy and agriculture markets at the global and national levels. The findings offer practical implications for policymakers and investment practitioners in understanding financial effects of mandating CRD to diversify risks depending upon market conditions and policy uncertainty.

In the recent few decades, there has been a rampant increase in the demand of sustainable food products around the world because of high cognizance of consumers toward environment and health. Asian countries, especially India and China, are also expecting a tremendous boost in the domestic demand for organic food products in the upcoming few years. Therefore, it becomes pertinent to explore the factors affecting the purchase intention behavior of organic food items, especially in emerging economies, i.e. India. Hence, the paper aims to explore the factors driving the purchase decision of organic consumers by collecting data set from 603 organic food item consumers in India.

The study has applied advanced statistical tools, i.e. structural equation modeling, Harman’s single factor test and other statistical measures, to analyze the collected research data.

The results posit that consumers’ purchase intention has a favorable impact on health aspects; trustworthiness; social innovativeness; functional value; subjective norms and organic product knowledge. Moreover, the result explicates that health consciousness and trustworthiness are vital predictors of organic food purchase intention.

The findings may assist the producers, processors, marketers, policymakers and regulators in devising appropriate policies and strategies for comprehending the complex phenomenon of organic consumers’ purchase behavior.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the drivers of purchase intention of organic food items by collecting data from well-defined consumers of organic food items in India.

This paper aims to examine the impacts of unstable off-farm employment on the probability and stability of farmland rent-out and explore its mechanisms.

The paper adopts Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), Probit, Tobit, Order probit models with two-way fixed effects to conduct empirical analysis based on the balanced panel data collected in 2016 and 2023 with a national representativeness sample of 1,206 rural households in 100 villages across 5 provinces in China.

The empirical results showed that unstable off-farm employment had negative effects on the probability of farmland rent-out, but it had no effects on the stability of farmland rent-out. The mechanism analysis showed that unstable off-farm employment affected the probability of farmland rent-out by decreasing the probability of purchasing houses in city and endowment insurance with high pension. Heterogeneity analysis indicated that the negative effect of unstable off-farm employment was much larger for the households with higher share of labor engaging in off-farm employment outside home county, elder members in the households and those located in the villages of mountain areas.

This paper is the first to define the unstable off-farm employment from the perspective of incontiguous off-farm employment for several years, which could capture the normality rather than particular case in a certain year of off-farm employment among rural labors. Using these new measurements of unstable off-farmland, this paper examined the impacts and mechanisms of share of unstable off-farm employment on the probability and stability of farmland rent-out.

This study explores the direct and indirect effects of two components of food-related consideration of future consequences (CFCs), including CFC-Immediate and CFC-Future, on sustainable food attitudes (SFA) via food-related health and environmental concerns.

Partial least squares structural equation modeling technique was used on a data set of 664 Vietnamese consumers collected in Central Vietnam to evaluate measurement and structural models.

CFC-Immediate and CFC-Future as well as health and environmental concerns have positive effects on SFA. Indirect effects of CFC-Immediate on SFA via health concerns and CFC-Future on SFA via health/environmental concerns are also discovered.

Future studies should examine the impact of environmental values on CFCs, forming a more comprehensive understanding regarding the relationship between the two variables, especially by including a wider range of sustainable food types to gain diverse knowledge about sustainable food consumption.

Communicative messages should focus on both health and environmental concerns while emphasizing both immediate and more distant outcomes of sustainable food (fish) consumption for individuals with different dominant temporal orientations.

This study sheds light on the direct and hierarchical relationships among food-related CFCs, health and environmental concerns and SFA to better understand the intricate psychological process of sustainable food consumption.

This work uses survey data from the Portuguese Securities Market Commission (Comissão de Mercado de Valores Mobiliários – CMVM) to examine financial literacy and literacy bias. The main objective of this study is to shed light on this issue by identifying the individual characteristics that are associated with financial literacy, namely overconfidence and underconfidence, which in turn might help explain individuals' financial decisions. The study distinguishes two groups, i.e. students and nonstudents, and considers several characteristics that are usually employed in this stream of research.

The data are based on a survey conducted by a partnership between the CMVM and a consortium of Portuguese universities. This paper has a three-fold aim. First, it studies the main individual features associated with objective financial literacy. Second, it analyzes the relationship between those variables and the bias between self-perceived and objective literacy, distinguishing overconfidence and underconfidence. Third, and most originally, this framework was also used to examine the differences between students and nonstudents. Those aims are pursued using cross-sectional ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions, except for the study of the literacy bias, for which the authors use an ordered probit.

Literacy is higher in individuals of the male gender who are older, have higher incomes, live in metropolitan areas, are highly educated, have a field of study related to finance and have high self-perceived literacy. Younger people are more overconfident. Unconditionally, women are less overconfident than men, but conditionally, they overestimate their knowledge. People holding securities and with a field of study related to finance are more overconfident. The gender effect is mainly driven by students, and the impact of a field of study and of holding securities on overconfidence decreases and increases, respectively, for students. The results highlight the importance of financial education.

Due to the way that the questionnaire was made available, there is no guarantee that the sample is representative of the Portuguese general population, or, for that matter, representative of the typical Portuguese retail investors or households. Also, there is no guarantee that the same individual did not answer the questionnaire more than once, although this is highly improbable. The link to the online questionnaire was only transmitted within e-mail databases owned by the CMVM and Portuguese universities, so the authors cannot guarantee its unbiasedness.

The authors' results may help the National Plan for Financial Education (the acronym in Portuguese is PNFF) fine-tune the required actions towards different target groups and, most importantly, highlight that different groups may require different approaches aiming to narrow the gap between objective and perceived literacy. The first step should be creating procedures to provide feedback on the objective and perceived literacy of those who enroll in financial formation programs.

The study distinguishes two groups, students and nonstudents, providing additional insights that might guide policymakers on how to structure financial education to enhance individual financial behavior. This is especially important in a country such as Portugal which has the lowest objective financial literacy in the Eurozone.

This study contributes to the financial literacy literature, in particular to the stream of research that focuses on psychological biases, by shedding light on the factors associated with both individual overconfidence and underconfidence. Differentiating between students and nonstudents provides additional insights, which might guide policymakers on how to structure financial education to enhance individual financial behavior.

This study aims to examine the role of various Instagram contents on customer behavior. The studied case is associated with herbal teas sold on active Instagram pages.

A structured questionnaire is exploited to collect data from customers. The integration of two entropy weight methods and weighted sum method are used to evaluate the priority of contents. In addition, model development is illustrated through which Instagram broadcasting tools are prioritized benefiting from fuzzy cognitive map method.

The results illustrate that customer behavior is moderated by content types, which empirically enhances the profitability of the business. The results of this study reveal that educational live, show other ones experience at live as well as motivational lives are the most effective contents. This study is a pioneering one to practically assess the construct of social media engagement through the effects of content types on the Instagram platform.

The effects of various contents, including motivational content, other customers’ experiences, products, educational content and purchase bill, on customer behavior are studied.