Modeling cross‐border supply chain collaboration: the case of the Belt and Road Initiative

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has resulted in international, cross-border supply chains returning to a new prominence. The BRI presents opportunities for cross-border supply chain collaboration (SCC) research. Assessing the influencing factors of cross-border SCC is beneficial for understanding and improving this evolving, globally influential international trade policy. The BRI is quite complex so that subjective assessment methods are useful but need to be improved. To address this issue, this paper initially develops a cross-border SCC factor framework based on synergetic theory. A vague set and DEMATEL methods are integrated to form a unified model to support the assessment. A combination weighting that uses analytic hierarchy process and an entropy weighting method, that is, a data crawler for BRI-related documents, to ensure that objective importance weights of the factors in the Belt and Road context are achieved. The results show that information sharing, profit allotment, the degree of trust, and goal congruence as common drivers of SCC are not driving factors in the Belt and Road cross-border context. They are core issues that do not affect cross-border SCC directly. Senior manager support and customs regulation are two important drivers of cross-border SCC. The practitioners of cross-border SCC should not only focus on the support from senior managers and customs regulation but also attempt to improve performance, such as information sharing and trust, to obtain more support from senior managers and policy makers to promote cross-border SCC indirectly.