Despite the remarkable growth in the insurance industry over the past two decades, few studies evaluate the performance of Takaful vs. conventional insurance firms with focus on the standard structure of production as a two-stage process, that is, operations and profitability. Thus, this research examines the performance of Saudi Arabia’s insurance market using a two-stage data envelopment analysis to assess the efficiency of the two production stages and accordingly, define the leader stage. The empirical results obtained using data for 26 conventional and seven Takaful insurance firms for 2014–2017 indicate declining average efficiency scores for both firm types. In other words, Saudi Arabia’s insurance market warrants new consolidation and foreign participation regulations to assist firms in becoming dynamic and strong. This study makes a significant contribution given the dearth of an exclusive analysis on the two-stage efficiency of Saudi Arabia’s Takaful and conventional insurance firms. Further, it offers key implications for decision makers, regulators, and managers associated with the insurance industry in Saudi Arabia and other emerging insurance markets.

The high contagion rates of COVID-19 and the limited amounts of vaccines forced public health authorities to develop vaccinations strategies for minimizing mortality, avoiding the collapse of health care infrastructure, and reducing their negative impacts to societies and economies. We propose a Multi Criteria Group Decision Making for prioritizing a set of COVID-19 vaccination alternatives, under a picture fuzzy environment, where the weights for Decisions Experts (DE) and criteria are unknown. A panel of six DEs assess six criteria for prioritizing four groups for vaccination. The weights for DE and criteria are handled in the form of fuzzy sets. Three types of weights are calculated: subjective, objective, and mixture weights.

To achieve sustainable development goals and foster future prosperity globally, the promotion of green development is essential. Nevertheless, persistent regional disparities in green development among the G20 nations stem from differing economic and environmental conditions in dynamic contexts. In light of these conditions, it is essential for governments to evaluate their country's current green development performance in comparison with higher-performing nations and to learn from their experiences. This study introduces a new dynamic evaluation framework that integrates the importance of evaluation indicators using the dynamic entropy weighting method, a Dynamic Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution method, and principal component analysis. This framework serves as a tool for G20 countries to assess their green development levels between 2015 and 2021. A key contribution of this study is the facilitation of the G20's ability to implement relevant reform measures and monitor green development progress in a dynamic environment. This framework can serve as a model for similar evaluations in other regions globally. The study's main findings indicate that G20 countries with high levels of green development possess strong economic foundations and prioritise the balanced development of their economies, societies, environments, and innovation.

Decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) is a practical method used to analyze the interrelationships between criteria while evaluating their importance in multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problems. This paper proposes an extension to DEMATEL using a fuzzy set—specifically, an interval-valued spherical fuzzy set (IVSFS)—which is one of the latest fuzzy developments. In contrast to the fuzzy extensions of DEMATEL reported in the literature, this study proposes a new IVSFS version of the DEMATEL methodology that incorporates experts’ weights. The proposed IVSFS–DEMATEL methodology uniquely manages the weights of experts using the form of IVSFSs, differing from existing DEMATEL methodologies. Furthermore, it aims to maintain the fuzziness of operations until the later stages, unlike existing methodologies that implement defuzzification operations at the early stages. A real case study of an early-stage investment process is conducted to justify the feasibility and applicability of the proposed methodology. Sensitivity and comparison analysis are performed to confirm the validity of the results.