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Oil price shocks greatly impact the global economy, but the effects vary among countries. While higher oil prices benefit oil-exporting countries, they harm the economic performance of oil-importing nations, and vice versa for lower oil prices. However, economic relations, such as trade, can mitigate the impacts of oil price shocks on both groups. In this paper, the authors aim at estimating the effects of oil price shocks on the major net oil-exporting and net oil-importing countries while accounting for international trade.

The authors derive a reduced form of a macro model and set up a Panel VAR model to estimate the direct and indirect impacts of oil price shocks on economic growth. The sample includes data on macroeconomic variables from 30 oil-exporting and oil-importing countries that comprise more than 73 percent of the world's economy. The authors construct the spillover variables using bilateral trade matrix. To control for institutional and structural variations across the countries, they are divided into four groups of developed and developing oil-exporting and oil-importing countries.

The results reveal that all oil-exporting countries have significantly benefited from oil price shocks, although trade has dampened the effect. The positive growth effect has been more pronounced in oil-exporting developing countries. The impact of oil price shocks on oil-importing countries has been negative with a one-year delay, but not statistically significant, and trade has only had a small effect. The effect has been more substantial in oil-importing developing countries.

One of the limitations of this study is the focus on trade as the main spillover channel. Given the data availability, other channels such as foreign investment and financial markets can also be included in future studies.

Removing trade restrictions would help both oil-exporting and oil-importing countries to mitigate the negative impacts of the oil price shocks. However, the asymmetric oil-macroeconomy relationship across oil-exporting and oil-importing countries puts oil-exporting countries in a more vulnerable position as they cannot rely on trade with oil-importing countries to reduce the negative impacts of lower oil prices on their growth. Therefore, it is crucial for oil-exporting countries to reassess their oil-dependent development plans and invest their oil revenues in non-oil sectors to diversity their economies and prepare for a future with reduced dependence on oil.

The recent technological advances, structural changes, and increasing energy efficiency suggest that major oil-importing countries will become less dependent on oil in near future. As a result, oil-exporting countries will also need to undergo structural changes in order to sustain their income level. These significant changes will have important social implications, particularly in the labor market, during the transition, for which preparation will be necessary.

While the literature on the total impact of oil price shocks on either oil-exporting or oil-importing countries is rich, studies on their spillover impacts are limited. Recent research has shown that trade and migration can affect the impact of oil price shock on the economy in federated countries such as Canada. However, the trade effect on oil price shocks in the international level, where countries are subject to different regulations/restrictions and institutional variations, remains scarce. By considering the trade relationship between different groups of oil-exporting and oil-importing countries, the authors aim to contribute to the literature of the global impacts of oil price shocks on the world economy.

The objective of this paper is twofold as follows: first, it explores the relationship between economic growth and the environment in the context of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) in Iran, as a semi-industrialized and largest developing economy in the Middle East. Second, it investigates the effectiveness of government spending on environmental protection.

The paper uses the ecological footprint data and an ARDL model to gauge the income and government spending effects on environmental improvement. This method avoids the problems associated with using the regression including a squared income.

The results find no evidence for a turning point in the income–pollution relationship and no significant impact of government spending on reducing footprint. We conjecture that the structure of the economy and the weak institutional quality may explain the results.

This includes limited time series data on institutional quality indices and their small variations over time.

Creating an environmental fund using the oil windfall and applying environmental tax/subsidies policies will help address increasing environmental challenges in energy-rich developing countries. Education and public awareness about environmental problems and their impacts on the standard of living are also nonexpensive but effective ways to increase citizen's engagement towards improving environment.

The EKC may take different forms in various countries depending on their economic structure and institution qualities.

The paper uses the ARDL method rather than a commonly used regression with a squared income to estimate the EKC. It also uses ecological footprint as a measure of environmental damage. Exploring government effectiveness in managing public good is also novel in the empirical literature.

Lignite coal-fired power plants are the main electricity generators in the province of Saskatchewan, Canada. Although burning lignite coal to generate power is economical, it produces significant greenhouse gases making it a big challenge to Canada’s international commitment on emission reduction. However, abundant agricultural crops and sawdust produced in Saskatchewan put the province in a good position to produce and use agri-pellets as an alternative fuel to generate electricity. This study aims to conduct an economic and environmental analysis of the replacement of lignite coal by agri-pellets as the fuel for Saskatchewan’s coal-fired power plants.

The study estimates the economic and environmental costs and benefits of two alternative fuels for power plants. The economic analysis is based on the pellet production and transportation costs from farms to production sites and from the production sites to power plants. In the production process, biomass precursors are densified with and without additives to produce fuel agri-pellets with appropriate mechanical durability and high heating value per volume unit. The environmental analysis involves estimation of greenhouse gas emissions and their social costs for lignite coal and different types of agri-pellets under different scenarios for pellet production and transportation.

The results show that although the total cost of electricity is lower for coal than agri-pellets, the gap shrinks when social costs and specifically a carbon price of $50/tonne are included in the model. The cost of electricity in lignite coal-fired power plants would also be on par with agri-pellets-fired power plants if the carbon price is between U$68 and $78 per tonne depending on the power plant locations. Therefore, a transition from coal to agri-pellet fuels is feasible if a high-enough price is assigned to carbon. The method and the results can be generalized to other places with similar conditions.

There are a few caveats in this study as follows. First, the fixed costs associated with the transformation of the existing coal-fired power plants to pellet-fired plants are not considered. Second, the technological progress in the transportation sector, which would favor the net benefits of using pellets versus coal, is not included in the analysis. Finally, the study does not address the possible political challenges facing the transition in the context of the Canadian federal system.

The study results indicate that the current carbon price of $50 per tonne is not sufficient to make the agri-pellets a feasible source of alternative energy in Saskatchewan. However, if carbon pricing continues to rise by $15 annually starting in 2022, as announced, a transition from coal to agri-pellets will be economically feasible.

Canada is committed to reduce its emission according to the Paris agreement, and therefore, needs to have a concrete policy to find alternative energy sources for its coal-fired power plants. This study examines the challenges and benefits of such transition using the existing agri-pellet resources in Saskatchewan, a province with abundant agricultural residues and coal-fired power plants. The findings indicate that a significant emission reduction can be achieved by using agri-pellets instead of coal to produce electricity. The study also implies that the transition to renewable energy is economical when social costs of carbon (carbon tax) is included in the analysis.

As far as the authors know, this is the first study providing a socio-economic analysis for a possible transition from the coal-fired power plants to a more clean and sustainable renewable energy source in one of the highest carbon dioxide (CO₂) producer provinces in Canada: Saskatchewan. The study builds upon the technical production of three agri-pellets (oat hull, canola hull and sawdust) and estimates the economic and environmental costs of alternative fuels under different scenarios.

The Iranian banking industry has been greatly affected by dramatic changes in macroeconomic conditions over the past several decades owing to volatile oil revenues, changing fiscal and monetary policies, and the imposition of US sanctions. The main objective of this paper is to estimate potential credit losses in the Iranian banking sector due to macroeconomic shocks and assess the minimum economic capital requirements under the baseline and distressed scenarios. The paper also contrasts the applications of linear and nonlinear models in estimating the impacts of macroeconomic shocks on financial institutions.

The paper uses a multistage approach to derive the portfolio loss distribution for banks. In the first step, the dynamic relationship between the selected macroeconomic variables are estimated using a VAR model to generate the stress scenarios. In the second step, the default probabilities are estimated using a quantile regression model and the results are compared with those of the conventional linear models. Finally, the default probabilities are simulated for a one-year time horizon using Monte-Carlo method and the portfolio loss distribution is calculated for hypothetical portfolios. The expected loss includes the loss given default for loans drawn randomly and uniformly distributed and exposed at default values when loans are assigned a fixed value.

The results indicate that the loss distributions under all scenarios are skewed to the right, with the linear model results being very similar to those of quantile at the 50% quantile, but very unlike those at the 10% and 90% quantiles. Specifically, the quantile model for the 90% (10%) quantile generates estimates of minimum economic capital requirement that are considerably higher (lower) than those using the linear model.

The study has focused on credit risk because of lack of data on other types of risk at individual bank level. The future studies can estimate the aggregate economic capital using a risk aggregation approach and a panel data (not presently available), which could further improve the accuracy of the estimates.

The fiscal and monetary authorities in developing countries, specially oil-exporting countries, can follow the risk assessment approach to assess the health of their banking system and adapt policies to mitigate the impacts of large macroeconomic shocks on their financial markets.

This is the first paper estimating the portfolio loss distribution for the Iranian banks under turbulent macroeconomic conditions using linear and nonlinear models. The case study can be applied to other developing and emerging countries, particularly those highly dependent on natural resources, prone to extreme macroeconomic shocks.

Iran as an energy‐rich country faces many challenges in the optimal utilization of its vast resources. High rates of population and economic growth, a generous subsidies program, and poor resource management have contributed to rapidly growing energy consumption and high energy intensity over the past decades. The continuing trend of rising energy consumption will bring about new challenges as it will shrink oil export revenues, restraining economic activities. This calls for a study to explore alternative scenarios for the utilization of energy resources in Iran. The purpose of this paper is to model demand for energy in Iran and develop two business‐as‐usual and efficiency scenarios for the period 2005‐2030.

The authors use a techno‐economic or end‐use approach to model energy demand in Iran for different types of energy uses and energy carriers in all sectors of the economy and forecast it under two scenarios: business as usual (BAU) and efficiency.

Iran has a huge potential for energy savings. Specifically, under the efficiency scenario, Iran will be able to reduce its energy consumption 40 percent by 2030.The energy intensity can also be reduced by about 60 percent to a level lower than the world average today.

The paper presents a comprehensive study that models the Iranian energy demand in different sectors of the economy, using data at different aggregation levels and a techno‐economic end‐use approach to illuminate the future of energy demand under alternative scenarios.

This paper aims to provide information on the different methods of aflatoxin (AFT) degradation in rice.

Crops that are affected by AFT contamination include cereals, oilseeds, spices and tree nuts. AFT in rice may harm health to great extent, and if not properly determined, may cause death. The production and occurrence of mycotoxins differ depending on the geographic and climatic and environmental conditions; however, these toxicants can never be removed completely from the food supply.

Mycotoxins are commonly present in cereal grains such as rice and are not completely destroyed during their cooking and processing.

No review on detoxification of AFT has been found in rice.

This study aims to explore the mediating role of employee work engagement in the relationship between training and creativity in the education sector in India.

The sample for this study consisted of 260 faculty members from 11 public universities in the Punjab region. Partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was utilized to test the hypotheses.

The results of the study revealed that training has a significant direct and indirect effect on employee creativity through employee work engagement. The findings suggest that training can stimulate work engagement, highlighting the importance of fostering employee engagement for enhancing creativity.

While the method used in this study may not facilitate direct generalizations, it offers valuable insights into prevalent discursive strategies found in numerous contemporary public organizations.

The findings offer insights for designing targeted training interventions to enhance work engagement and foster creativity among faculty members in the education sector.

This study contributes to the existing literature by addressing a gap in research on the interaction between training, work engagement and creativity. As there have been limited studies on this topic in the education sector in India, this research provides novel insights and extends the understanding of how these variables are related.