Water scarcity is rising as a global issue, because the planet earth is facing a global water crisis, which is considered something that can destroy environmental sustainability of our planet. The fact is that humanity’s demand is depleting natural resources faster than nature can replenish itself; if human habits and unsustainable use of water resources do not change, water scarcity will inevitably intensify and become a major cause of conflict among different nations of the world. The water scarcity issue is a crucial issue but unfortunately it has not received due attention in past. Pakistan, which once was a water abundant country, now facing a situation of water scarcity. Pakistan has a poor irrigation system which results 60% loss of its water; Pakistan uses more water for crop production than other countries. Likewise, the country harvests water from rainfall, rivers, snow, and glaciers. The country is facing a serious water crisis that is caused by different factors, such as changing climatic conditions, rising population, poor irrigation system, poor political will, and rapid urbanization. The water crisis of Pakistan is expected to worsen in coming years. This is a drastic situation which calls for emergency measures. With this background, the present study provides a detailed view of the water situation in the country with challenges to water management. The study also suggests some recommendations for policymakers to improve the water crisis situation in the future.

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The risk perceived by investors is crucial in the decision to invest, in particular when it concerns a foreign country. The risk associated to any (foreign) investment is a multi-faceted element given that it reflects many aspects that are relevant to (foreign) investors, such as the level of transparency, corruption, rule of law, governance, etc. In this paper we consider the level of economic freedom, as provided by the “Heritage Foundation”, for the most recent years, in order to analyse how is this measure of risk related to the inward foreign direct investment performance index, as provided by the UNCTAD. Given the subjectivity of risk an appropriate methodology consists on using fuzzy logic clustering, which is applied in the paper in order to verify how different the MENA region is from the set of EU-member states. The results show that economic freedom and inward FDI are positively associated, in particular in the cluster of countries that present a higher economic freedom. Of particular interest is the result that some MENA countries belong to the same cluster of most of the EU-countries

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By the use of fuzzy logic, this paper shows how confidence is related to unemployment in Portugal. The results indicate it to be a worthwhile exercise, as the apparent importance of unemployment upon confidence is only revealed by the fuzzy logic approximation.

The great majority of the theoretical analyses about electoral cycles has considered the national space as the territory of interest when studying the economic consequences of an electoralist behaviour by the central government. This fact, in conjunction to the nature of the data most commonly available, has lead many authors to empirical studies that test the evidence of electoral cycles mostly at a national level. Given that the election results for the main parties, at least in Portugal, clearly reflect some spatial localisation we find rather intriguing to verify that so very few of those empirical studies use spatial econometrics techniques. The main objective of the paper is to detect empirical evidence supporting the existence of a link between voters' ideology and the 2002 election results obtained by the two main parties in Portugal. The confrontation of the spatial econometric results with the ones obtained ignoring the spatial localisation of the data shows that, in order to better understand the election results, space must be taken into account. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg 2005Elections, Partisan models, Portugal, Spatial econometrics, Voters,

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† We would like to thank the comments and suggestions of the audience of the Euro-Asia Forum in Politics, Economics and Business-2018, in which this article was presented. The article also improved with the corrections suggested by an anonymous reviewer, whom we thank. The standard disclaimer applies.