ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the social and economic well-being of the world. From an economic perspective, nations around the world have been negatively impacted by the pandemic, including Malaysia. Billions of Ringgit Malaysia have been lost, and businesses, especially SMEs, have suffered tremendously. However, the number of online businesses has increased due to the pandemic response that forced people to stay home. Thus, this paper studies the online business phenomenon among SMEs in Malaysia. The study employs a quantitative survey among online business entrepreneurs in Malaysia. Based on the findings, it reveals that of the SMEs in Malaysia that ventured into online business, most were motivated by the pandemic as they saw it as a business opportunity. Surprisingly, the majority of them agreed that the pandemic positively impacted their business and their sustainability. © 2022 by the authors.
ABSTRACT
COVID-19's Infection and the mortality rates pushed the governments to impose lockdowns that caused huge economical losses. This pandemic also changed our social and personal life and causes severe psychological problems. Continuous mutations of the COVID-19 virus and unabated transmission rate made it unsustainable to continue the lockdowns. Discovery of suitable vaccine brings a glimmer of hope to the race against this virus. However, the real task is to manufacture, distribute and vaccinate the world's entire population within a reasonable time. Considering the state of healthcare infrastructure and vaccine cold storage facilities, this is going to be a challenge. This paper collected the opinion of 17 decision makers representing the various levels of Covid-19 vaccination programme such as vaccine manufacturer and vaccine administrator. Then, Best Worst Method, a Multi-Criteria Decision Making method was applied to understand the critical factors for the success of this vaccination programme in India. This method elicited consistent pairwise comparisons from the decision makers. Results signify the immediate need to scale up the investment in the vaccine cold storage and the need to reduce vaccine wastage for the success of this vaccination programme.