Zarinah Yusof

The relationship between air pollution, fossil fuel energy consumption, and water resources in the panel of selected Asia-Pacific countries.

The objective of the study is to examine the relationship between air pollution, fossil fuel energy consumption, water resources, and natural resource rents in the panel of selected Asia-Pacific countries, over a period of 1975–2012. The study includes number of variables in the model for robust analysis. The results of cross-sectional analysis show that there is a significant relationship between air pollution, energy consumption, and water productivity in the individual countries of Asia-Pacific. However, the results of each country vary according to the time invariant shocks. For this purpose, the study employed the panel least square technique which includes the panel least square regression, panel fixed effect regression, and panel two-stage least square regression. In general, all the panel tests indicate that there is a significant and positive relationship between air pollution, energy consumption, and water resources in the region. The fossil fuel energy consumption has a major dominating impact on the changes in the air pollution in the region.

Nexus between economic sanctions and inflation: a case study in Iran

ABSTRACT Conventional studies have applied dummy variables to analyse the relationship between economic sanctions and inflation while we construct an index which is called Trade-Financial Sanctions (TF index). TF Index is a liner combination of indices which includes trade openness and foreign investment by applying the principal component model. Through the TF index and market exchange rate the impact of economic sanctions on inflation is analysed in the three phases of sanctions; free sanctions, heavy sanctions, and light sanctions. The results illustrate that the TF index decreases inflation when the Iran’s economy experiences free sanctions or light sanctions relative to when the economy is in heavy sanctions. Heavy sanctions create instability in the market exchange rates and widening the gap between the market and the official exchange rates. Furthermore, economic sanctions increase expected inflation among the people and drive higher inflation. Therefore, these results suggest that the government should work more seriously to solve the main obstacles of trade and investment inflows imposed by the economic sanctions.