The main objective of this research was to disclose the correlative contribution of urban-associated factors affecting the COVID-19 outbreak in the macro-scale of MECA countries and the downscaled micro-scale of the provincial divisions in Iran. For this purpose, the correlation coefficients between the variables and clustering analysis were used to expose the possible effects. Results revealed the comparatively strong relationships between some independent variables (e.g., total greenhouse gas emissions, CO 2 emissions, nitrous oxide emissions, and urban population) and confirmed cases (R from 0.619 to 0.695), demonstrating the possible effective role of urbanization and its induced GHG emissions on the COVID-19 outbreak in the country level of the MECA region. Therefore, the results significantly confirmed the strong relationships between some independent variables (e.g., total population, urban population, fuel consumption, NO 2 –CO 2 emissions, energy use, and total intra-changed travels) and confirmed cases (R from 0.724 to 0.945), explaining an explicit relationship between urbanization processes and the COVID-19 outbreak in Iran. Besides, the HCA results revealed the substantial role of the urban population and urban-induced energy use and gas emission in clustering locations regarding the COVID-19 outbreak in both the MECA region and Iran. The main implication of this research is to give a practical correlation between Coronavirus infection and urban constitution, aiming to increase the health of urban societies by creating effective planning in the future.

In the present study, an expert empirical analysis was carried out to assess the innovative strategies to improve the employment rate in the tourism small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) of Iran. The methodology of this paper was extended based on two qualitative and quantitative techniques, namely strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and quantitative strategic planning matrix. Within this context, three strategies were chosen based on the sum of total attractiveness scores to increase more creation of new jobs and employment positions in tourism SMEs. Two aggressive and competitive strategies were entitled as ‘developing financial support to create the new job and employment positions using tourist’s finances’ and ‘defining smart skills and technologies to improve tourism SMEs toward the pandemic impacts’ in addition to a conservative strategy of ‘providing training support and education technology in the tourism SMEs. Results revealed that the contribution of total direct (indirect) employment to gross domestic product could be anticipated to equal 5.34% (14.86%) in the status quo (2020) by an enhanced rate of 1.97 (2.09) times compared with 2015. Ultimately, technological approaches were described under the innovative strategies to enhance new jobs and employment creation in the tourism SMEs of Iran.

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