This endeavor explores the nexus between health expenditure, consumption of renewable energy, economic growth, and the quality of the environment in 10 central European nations from 2005 to 2018 utilizing the techniques of fully generalized least square (FGLS) and generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation. The outcomes reveal the significant association between health, economic, and environmental factors with green energy utilization. The utilization of fossil fuels negatively influences the quality of the environment and boosts the risk of several diseases associated with the undernourishment and respiratory system and thus increases the death ratio. Furthermore, the utilization of operations based on renewable energy usage exerts a substantial favorable influence upon residents of Central European (CE) nations and thus helps decrease health and pollution-related expenses. So, there needs to be a collaboration among all the stakeholders so that green growth in the service and industrial sectors can be achieved.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the performance of Takaful and conventional insurance companies in Saudi Arabia during a period of 2010-2015 by using the data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique for the whole population of insurance companies.
Design/methodology/approach
Given its objectives, the present study adopts the most prevalent DEA approach, by using the DEA Solver-Pro (Version 13). The DEA has emerged as a valuable analytical research technique. It measures the relative efficiency of firms in the presence of multiple inputs and outputs, based on a linear programming technique, and attempts to find out the firms that determine an envelopment frontier, are super efficient and with a higher productivity index.
Findings
It stems from the analysis that on a yearly basis, the average efficiency scores of firms have soared up overtime since 2010 till 2014 reflecting that most of the companies did well on the efficiency front. It is notable to mention here that the top slots for super efficiency are taken over by smaller firms, while the bigger firms are laggards here rather than the leaders. This reflects that the larger insurance firms need to augment their efficiency levels through more efficient utilization of inputs. The results of the study reveal that both Takaful and the larger conventional insurance firms in the country need to strengthen their operations more efficiently in order to take advantage of the economies of scale and scope. Market share and profitability are important determinants of efficiency.
Research limitations/implications
The larger insurance firms in the country need to a possible solution to the issue of inefficient market dynamics might lie in consolidation of the market through mergers and acquisitions. However, this needs a direct involvement of regulators in the Kingdom so that the market becomes healthy. Even though the Saudi insurance sector appears to have benefited from the compulsory insurance regulations for the expatriates and their families, however, there is still a need for efficiency and productivity improvement in the industry. The Takaful firms need to adopt such measures that would help them to take advantage of their specialized products toward efficiency vis-à-vis productivity drives. Finally, the insurance firms in Saudi Arabia need to adopt the use of threshold practices in order to compare their relative performance to improve on their efficiency and productivity levels by catching-up with the frontiers of best practices.
Originality/value
Based on the available literature, an exclusive study on the insurance sector of Saudi Arabia is so far non-existent. The study stands as pioneer to provide a starting point on overall performance evaluation of insurance firms in Saudi Arabia in various contexts in addition to the current and future trends of the insurance sector in the Kingdom.
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We investigate the impact of renewable energy and green practices (RE), transportation services and infrastructure (T.S.), GDP growth (GDP), and forestry and natural resources (AFF) on the sustainable tourism development in the Eastern European Countries (EECs). The study employed cross-sectional dependence and and CIPS unit root test to check stationarity along with the dynamic common correlated effect (DCCE) model proposed by Chudik and Pesaran (2015) to test parameters for ensuring robustness. The outcome of DCCE method suggests that renewable energy (RE), Transport Services (T.S.), Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing (AFF), and economic growth (GDP) have a significantly positive impact on international tourism in the sampled countries of Europe. Our findings could be insightful for policymakers and understanding the impact of renewable energy and transportation services on tourism development, and thereby help in taking appropriate policy measures in the sampled countries.
This empirical study aims to identify the importance of Digital Technologies (DT) as an enabler in the Circular Economy (C.E.) based business model, especially during Covid-19. The concept of 'circular economy' has now been advocated as a methodology to stimulate economic growth in line with the environmental sustainability. Hence, the practices of recycling, reduction, reuse/re-manufacture, and repairing (4R's) are deemed to be the core of a circular economy. Recently, the advent of the pandemic Covid-19 has forced the nations of the world to resort to alternate resource use in their manufacturing and trading of goods and services as the supply chains have almost remained disrupted since Covid-19 appeared. We investigate the impacts of Covid-19 upon the use of technological innovation (T.I.), circular economy practices (CEP), and organizational performance (ORP) incorporating the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Our results show that Covid-19 significantly impacted the adoption of technological innovation, circular economy, which leads toward organizational performance. Moreover, the practices and operations under the circular economy framework also appear to influence organizational performance significantly. Our study findings bring forward meaningful insights into improving CEF-cum-technology based practices in developing and emerging markets in Asia, and convey significant implications for the business community, policymakers, and researchers.
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