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The world has been waging a fight against the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) since December 2019. The current coronavirus crisis is a catastrophe affecting billions of families worldwide. So far, COVID-19 has wreaked havoc across the globe: by slowing down economic growth; decreasing global trade; hurting health sector; increasing unemployment and underemployment; reducing FDI and hurting the tourism sector. This study investigates the economic costs of COVID-19. By using descriptive analysis, this study shows that the major economic variables, such as economic growth, global trade, health sector, unemployment and underemployment, foreign direct investment and travel and tourism sector have significantly affected by COVID-19.

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Environmental degradation is causing global warming, which is of the utmost concern to both physical and social scientists. A number of potential determinants of environmental degradation are analysed in the literature. This study examines the role of government expenditure and financial development in environmental degradation in the context of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis for the Venezuelan economy. Time series data have been analysed for this purpose. The long-term relationship between the variables in this study is established through a bounds test in the presence of an unknown structural break. The results of this study confirm the EKC hypothesis. It is found that energy use is harming the quality of the environment not only in the long run but also in the short run. This study finds a positive impact of government expenditure on environmental degradation, which indicates that the Venezuelan government is not taking its expenditure for a sustainable environment into account. Moreover, this study finds that financial development is hindering environmental degradation. This means that financial institutions in Venezuela can help to develop the concept of sustainable energy in the country and the Venezuelan government can reduce carbon emissions through financial development.

This study evaluates the impact of terrorism on economic performance in Islamic States of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) from the year 2004 to 2013. Study applied the economics of crime monitoring model by Ruiz Estrada and Ndoma (J Policy Model 36:867-882, 2014) for analysis.The application of the model for ISIS has five phases (a) the total terrorism frequency rate (b) (b) the national terrorism vulnerability rate (l T ) (c) the terrorism devastation magnitude rate (k) (d) the economic desgrowth rate (d) (e) the terrorism vulnerability surface. The results of study conclude that terrorism has badly affected the economic performance of ISIS during the study period. Instead of direct fighting against the terrorist group in ISIS, the developed world especially the Europe and United States of America may review the terrorism policy about these economies and may eradicates the terrorism by reducing poverty, religious discrimination and inequality to increase the opportunity cost of terrorism.