Mete Feridun

Impact of Trade Liberalization on the Environment in Developing Countries

This article aims at investigating the impact of trade openness on pollution and resource depletion in Nigeria. Results indicate that pollution is positively related to trade intensity and real GDP per square kilometer, while capital to labor ratio and GNP are negatively related to pollution. In addition, strong evidence suggests that trade intensity, real GDP per square kilometer and GNP are positively related to environmental degradation indicating that the technique, scale, and total effects of liberalization are detrimental to the environment. The composition effect of trade liberalization on natural resource utilization, on the other hand, is beneficial. A number of policy implications emerge from the study for Nigeria as well as other developing economies.

Forecasting inflation through econometric models: an empirical study on Pakistani data

This article aims at modeling and forecasting inflation in Pakistan. For this purpose a number of econometric approaches are implemented and their results are compared. In ARIMA models, adding additional lags for p and/or q necessarily reduced the sum of squares of the estimated residuals. When a model is estimated using lagged variables, some observations are lost. Results further indicate that the VAR models do not perform better than the ARIMA (2, 1, 2) models and, the two factor model with ARIMA (2, 1, 2,) slightly performs better than the ARIMA (2, 1, 2). Although the study focuses on the problem of macroeconomic forecasting, the empirical results have more general implications for small scale macroeconometric models. Key words: Modeling and Forecasting Inflation, ARIMA, VAR The Information Technologist Vol.2(1) 2005: 15-21