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Discount grocery stores (DGSs) are attractive food supply chain (FSC) channels because many cost-conscious Indians use them for monthly needs. Despite capacity, DGSs must address customer concerns about store crowd densities and improve their COVID-19 preparedness. The purpose of this study is to learn how retail operations strategies can improve customer experience and how stores can benefit.

The study looked at a case study where retail operations are run more efficiently, and the customer experience is enhanced by standardizing and customizing customer transactions. The potential benefits that customers and retailers might anticipate are then statistically verified. Next, the potential benefits were examined to determine which ones from customers’ and retailers’ views should be prioritized to increase satisfaction.

The case situation analysis in the study demonstrates how DGSs can improve their retail operations to reduce customer wait times and provide greater convenience. The study also provides practitioners with potential benefits to pursue from the perspectives of retailers, customers and both retailers and customers.

This study requires many past transactions and can be considered an extension of the current study, so it does not capture floor space and capacity improvements.

This research can help FSC retailers compete with upstream supply chain partners and customers in omnichannel retailing. By improving DGS retailer capacity and customer experience, this study can benefit all FSC stakeholders.

Although there are numerous potential benefits that practitioners can pursue, the current study suggests that practitioners focus on those that can improve retailer and customer satisfaction.

This paper delves into the pivotal role of public libraries in supporting and promoting literacy, with a particular focus on their relevance in financially and infrastructurally low-resourced territories (FILTs). Literacy, being a fundamental skill, empowers individuals, enriches education and contributes to social and economic development. Nonetheless, numerous FILTs encounter substantial obstacles in granting access to quality education and fostering literacy skills among their people. As an opinion piece rooted in empirical literature, this paper serves as an introductory exploration, acknowledging that it only skims the surface of raising awareness.

This paper expands upon the existing body of literature concerning public libraries and the imperative for literacy programs. It purposefully addresses a range of issues that may appear contradictory in FILTs, primarily due to economic constraints. However, from the authors’ perspective, these issues actually highlight the vast potential for intervention and progress.

Numerous evident strategies can be identified to attain the goal of an enlightened and educated nation, fostering empowered individuals. One such approach involves prioritizing the promotion and support of literacy programs in public libraries. Nonetheless, there is a pressing need for heightened awareness regarding the significance of adopting a holistic perspective when addressing various interconnected issues. This includes the long-term advantages associated with an educated and literate society, particularly in FILTs.

The literature within the field of library and information science offers scarce publications regarding literacy support programs in libraries, despite the fact that fostering informed and literate citizens is a prominent goal in the mission and vision plans of numerous FILTs. This paper presents an exploratory perspective, aiming to raise awareness about the significance of considering diverse approaches to support and promote literacy in public libraries within FILTs. It also proposes the development of a framework as a means to facilitate this endeavor. While the context of the paper is framed for FILTs, aspects of the framework may also be useful and applicable in other well-resourced regions and libraries.

This paper aims to examine the dynamic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and government policy on real house price indices in five emerging economies, namely, Brazil, China, Thailand, Turkey and South Africa.

The authors use the local projection method with a panel data set of these countries spanning from January 2020 to July 2021.

The number of COVID-19 confirmed positive cases raised housing prices, whereas government containment measures reduced them. Both conventional and unconventional monetary policy implemented by central banks to cope with the COVID-19 helped increase housing prices. These effects were strengthened by the US monetary policy via globalized financial markets.

First, while previous researches typically concentrated on developed countries, the authors investigate emerging economies where proportionally more people were badly affected by the pandemic. Second, a panel data set of five emerging economies enabled the authors to examine the dynamic effects of the COVID-19 crisis on housing prices. Third, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study evaluating the influences of easing monetary policy on housing prices in emerging economies during the pandemic.

This study aims to investigate the impact of social grants on rural household welfare in a village located in one of the poorest provinces in South Africa – KwaZulu Natal Province. Actually, since the inception of democratic rule, the South African government has turned to social grants to address the issues of poverty, income inequality and to improve household welfare. The coverage of social grants has increased substantially with more than 17 million (about 34% of the population) South Africans being recipients of social grants. Despite having relatively well-developed social security system, poverty levels in rural parts of South Africa remains very high.

This study uses a cross-sectional households survey data conducted in Hlokozi village. A propensity score matching technique, which accounts for non-random selection of households, is applied.

The results reveal that social grants have a significant and positive impact on rural household welfare. Specifically, the nearest neighbour matching estimates suggest that the causal effect for social grants on household welfare is the region of about R5,830. Consistent with the nearest neighbouring method, the results obtained using the Kernel matching method show that social grants are significant in improving rural household welfare.

While there are a number of studies that have shed some light on how social grant reduces poverty in South Africa, there are some gaps. Firstly, only a few studies have interrogated the impact of social grants on household welfare. Secondly, most of these studies have relied on descriptive analysis, and finally, besides poverty being high in rural areas, research on the impact of social grants on rural household welfare remains thin.

This study aims to examine the factors (Stimuli) enhancing perceived utilitarian, social and conditional values (Organisms) of social commerce (s-commerce) platforms and their impact on small and medium enterprises’ (SMEs’) behavioral intention (Response) to adopt s-commerce.

Survey data were gathered from 304 Indian SMEs using s-commerce platforms. Data were analyzed using SmartPLS 3 software.

The results indicated that perceived values significantly impact SMEs’ behavioral intention to adopt s-commerce. Among conditional, utilitarian and social values, the conditional value of s-commerce sites was found to be the strongest motivator for SMEs to adopt s-commerce.

This research contributes to the growing literature on s-commerce, explaining how perceived value influences the decision of SMEs to adopt s-commerce platforms.

Among the significant influencers, perceived usefulness and perceived reputation were found to be the most effective triggers that stimulate perceived values of s-commerce sites. The findings draw due attention from policymakers toward environmental cues such as the legal and regulatory environment, which are instrumental in creating the most important perceived value for SMEs, i.e. conditional value.

By employing the inputs from the theory of consumption values and the Stimulus-Organism-Response framework, this original study looked beyond the technology factors and examined the role of perceived values of s-commerce platforms in shaping SMEs’ behavioral intention to adopt.

Research on financing for entrepreneurship has consolidated over the last decade. However, one question remains unanswered: how does the combination of external finance, such as equity and debt capital, and internal finance, such as working capital, affect the likelihood of grant funding over time? The purpose of this study is to analyse the relationship between different sources of financing and firms' ability to fundraise via innovation grants and to examine the role of female chief executive officer (CEO) in this relationship. Unlike equity and debt funding, innovation grants manifest a form of innovation acknowledgement and visibility, recognition of potential commercialization of inovation.

The authors use firm-level financial data for 3,034 high-growth firms observed in 2015, 2017 and 2019 across 35 emerging sectors in the United Kingdom (UK) to test the factors affecting the propensity of high-growth firms to secure an innovation grant as a main source of fundraising for innovation during the early stages of product commercialization.

The results do not confirm gender bias for innovation fundraising in new industries. This contrasts with prior research in the field which has demonstrated that access to finance is gender-biased. However, the role of CEO gender is important as it moderates the relationship between the sources of funding and the likelihood of accessing the grant funding.

This study does not analyse psychological or neurological factors that could determine the intrinsic qualities of male and female CEOs when making high-risk decisions under conditions of uncertainty related to innovation. Direct gender bias with regards to access to innovation grants could not be assumed. This study offers important policy implications and explains how firms in new industries can increase their likelihood of accessing a grant and how CEO gender can moderate the relationship between availability of internal and external funding and securing a new grant.

This study implicates and empirically demonstrates that gender bias does not apply in fundraising for innovation in new industries. As female CEOs represent various firms in different sectors, this may be an important signal for investors in new product development and innovation policies targeting gender bias and inclusion.

The authors draw on female entrepreneurship and feminist literature to demonstrate how various sources of financing and gender change the likelihood of grant funding in both the short and long run. This is the first empirical study which aims to explain how various internal and external sources of finance change the propensity of securing an innovation grant in new industries.

This study assesses the relevance of foreign aid to the incidence of capital flight and unemployment in 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

The study is for the period 1996–2018, and the empirical evidence is based on interactive quantile regressions in order to assess the nexuses throughout the conditional distribution of the unemployment outcome variable.

From the findings, capital flight has a positive unconditional incidence on unemployment, while foreign aid dampens the underlying positive unconditional nexus. Moreover, in order for the positive incidence of capital flight to be completely dampened, foreign aid thresholds of 2.230 and 3.964 (% of GDP) are needed at the 10th and 25th quantiles, respectively, of the conditional distribution of unemployment. It follows that the relevance of foreign aid in crowding out the unfavourable incidence of capital flight on unemployment is significantly apparent only in the lowest quantiles or countries with below-median levels of unemployment. The policy implications are discussed.

The study complements the extant literature by assessing the importance of development assistance in how capital flight affects unemployment in sub-Saharan Africa.

Public debt forecasts represent a key policy issue. Many methodologies have been employed to predict debt sustainability, including dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models, the stock flow consistent method, the structural vector autoregressive model and, more recently, the neuro-fuzzy method. Despite their widespread application in the empirical literature, all of these approaches exhibit shortcomings that limit their utility. The present research adopts a different approach to public debt forecasts, that is, the random forest, an ensemble of machine learning.

Using quarterly observations over the period 2000–2021, the present research tests the reliability of the random forest technique for forecasting the Italian public debt.

The results show the large predictive power of this method to forecast debt-to-GDP fluctuations, with no need to model the underlying structure of the economy.

Compared to other methodologies, the random forest method has a predictive capacity that is granted by the algorithm itself. The use of repeated learning, training and validation stages provides well-defined parameters that are not conditional to strong theoretical restrictions This allows to overcome the shortcomings arising from the traditional techniques which are generally adopted in the empirical literature to forecast public debt.

Trust is the glue that holds cooperative relationships together and often exists in an asymmetric manner. The purpose of this study is to explore how to mitigate the issue of losses or increased transaction costs caused by opportunistic behavior in a soft environment where trust asymmetry is quite common and difficult to avoid.

This study focuses on examining asymmetric trust between the government and the private sector in public-private partnership (PPP) projects. Drawing upon both project realities and relevant literature, the primary conditional variables influencing asymmetric trust are identified. These variables encompass power perception asymmetry, information asymmetry, interaction behavior, risk perception differences and government-side control. Subsequently, through the use of a survey questionnaire, binary-matched data from both the government and the private sector are collected. The study employs fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to conduct a configurational analysis, aiming to investigate the causal pathways that trigger asymmetric trust.

No single conditional variable is a necessary condition for the emergence of trust asymmetry. The pathways leading to a high degree of trust asymmetry can be categorized into two types: those dominated by power perception and those involving a combination of multiple factors. Differences in power perception play a crucial role in the occurrence of high trust asymmetry, yet the influence of other conditional variables in triggering trust asymmetry should not be overlooked.

The findings can contribute to advancing the study of trust relationships in the field of Chinese PPP projects. Furthermore, they hold practical value in facilitating the enhancement of trust relationships between the government and the private sector.

Although there is a rising demand for organic food restaurants (OFRs), limited studies have attempted at understanding the drivers of customers' intention to visit OFRs. There is also a need to examine customers' choice behaviour in the context of OFRs.

This study has assessed the effect of consumption values (functional, emotional, epistemic, conditional, quality and social) on the intention to visit OFRs by utilizing 1863 online customer reviews about different Indian OFRs (Study 1) and 205 survey-based responses of Indian customers (Study 2).

Findings show an overall positive sentiment towards OFRs. Results of Study 1 and Study 2 reveal that functional, quality, social and emotional values have a significant impact on customers' OFR visit intention. Interestingly, Study 2 found that epistemic values have an insignificant impact on customers' visit intention.

Study findings suggest that the OFR management need to provide a better ambience, and good quality organic food in OFRs. Additionally, managers of OFRs can train their staff to be well mannered, cooperative and sincere.

The study on OFRs is still in its nascent stage. The findings of this study will thus provide academicians and policy makers an idea of the consumption values that affect customers' intention to visit OFRs.