Humanitarian Supply Chain Agility: A Blockchain Integration Perspective

The requirement to improve the effectiveness of humanitarian aid has recently received increased attention.Even though some literature has acknowledged the key factors to success for humanitarian supply chain, such as cooperation, information sharing, resilience, how to create an agility supply chain in the disaster context has not been studied.To address this theory and practical gap, we construct the characteristic elements of the blockchain and propose a theoretical model to empirically study the impact of blockchain technology on humanitarian supply chain agility.Primary data are collected from 300 participants who work for Chinese humanitarian organizations.Blockchain technology further improves the agility of humanitarian supply chains through trust.All hypotheses are confirmed, with the transparency having the greatest impact on the humanitarian supply chain agility.Our study provides theoretical and empirical basis for further research on the humanitarian supply chain flexibility.We also note the limitations of our study and offer future research direction.