Amid the COVID‐19 pandemic, governments in most countries have played two key roles. First, to limit the disease's spread, and second to support small enterprises (SMEs) to revamp their operations. This study employs the best‐worst method technique to evaluate data from 150 managers to assess these government policies' effectiveness to quicken SMEs' operations amid COVID‐19 using Ghana as a case study. Our findings show that the three most effective government interventions in quickening SMEs' operations are soft loan, guarantee support, and interventions on statutory payments. We recommend that although the government should allocate greater resources to those policies with strategies contributing to the recovery process, they should not neglect the policies with lesser weights but should reduce their capital allocation. Our study offers insights into how governments can contribute to SMEs operations during exogenous shock. The findings can be useful to both researchers and policymakers towards revamping economies amid COVID‐19 pandemic.

PurposeExisting studies have found that most merger and acquisition (M&A) activities do not create the intended synergy. These studies have mainly investigated how firms' internal factors contribute to M&A successes or failures. The current study differs from the earlier ones by exploring how governments' activities can contribute to the creation of acquisition synergy.Design/methodology/approachA novel technique based on multi-objective optimization by ratio analysis and complex proportional assessment method under an interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy (IVIF) environment is proposed to prioritize these government roles needed during the M&A process focusing on the Chinese M&A market.FindingsEnactments of regulations and loan guarantees are the most important strategies to help Chinese acquirers overcome acquisition failures. While tax relief ranks third, government training support ranks fourth. Finally, the result shows that government institutional support is the least to help acquirers overcome acquisition failures.Practical implicationsThe government has a role to play in the acquisition success. Although this study has prioritized governments' role in relative importance order, the authors recommend that governments capable of providing all these strategies should do so without any specific order. However, if otherwise, governments should not neglect the strategies with less weight completely but rather consider reducing capital allocations to such strategies. Moreover, this study shows how firms with stronger business ties with government officials may enjoy success during acquisition activities. The authors recommend that firms intending to make acquisitions develop stronger ties with governments in order to benefits from governments.Originality/valueThis is the first study to develop a theoretical framework showing how government can contribute to M&A success. The study achieves this by extending Keynesian's arguments and identifies five (5) ways in which governments can ensure acquisition success. Second, within fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making (F-MCDM) research, this study is the first to show the applicability of integrated multi-objective optimization by ratio analysis (MULTIMOORA) and complex proportional assessment (COPRAS) techniques in an IVIF environment. The novel methodology proposed in this study offers an insightful research method to future studies focusing on group decision problems.

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Stakeholders have become worried about the environmental problems of agricultural production activities. Therefore, there is pressure on smallholder farmers to observe environmental regulations and embed sustainable green technologies in their production. The literature on green production has thoroughly emphasized the critical role of behavioral factors in adopting environmental sustainability practices. We develop a probabilistic linguistic preference selection index method to assess the behavioral constructs that promote the adoption of agricultural green production technologies (AGPTs) among smallholder rice farmers in an emerging economy. The result shows that the five most-important factors promoting the adoption of AGPTs include knowledge (0.828), perceived cost and benefit (0.819), descriptive norm (0.810), moral and environmental concern (0.809), and injunctive norm (0.807). The study findings offer insightful directions for examining rice farmers’ decisions on the adoption of AGPTs. Our findings imply that policymakers should consider multiple behavioral factors when designing policies that promote AGPTs. This study enriches farmers’ adoption decisions by modeling the uncertainties in the decision-making process.