This article has explored the impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)-induced decline in consumer durables and mobility on nitrogen dioxide (NO2) emission in Europe by providing empirical and graphical justifications based on consumer price index (CPI) and gross domestic product (GDP) deflator indexes. The empirical estimations show that carbon dioxide (CO2) and NOx emission along with other greenhouse gases drastically decreased in the wake of COVID-19-induced lockdowns and decrease in the demand of consumer goods in Europe. This means that COVID-19 improved environment in the European region. However, high cost (e.g., unemployment, loss of life, and social segregation) makes COVID-19 an unstable solution to environmental woes where positive impact of COVID-19 on environment achieved in short run cannot be guaranteed in the long run. Besides environment, COVID-19 drastically curtailed economic activities and exposed them to the risk of economic crisis particularly in case of Europe.
Background: Triticum aestivum L. (Wheat) is vital grain crop used globally as a staple food. The increasing population is posing a great challenge for agriculture sector especially to secure the availability of wheat. In Pakistan, from the last few years’ wheat productivity has improved but it is still far less than other countries. Its low productivity is attributed to various factors like weeds, pests, diseases, soil fertility and moisture. To overcome these obstacles, there is a dire need to assess the genetic variability of wheat by rapid and reliable methods. Observations for nine morphological traits were noted and analysis was done at 0.05 probability level. Methods: To study the genetic variability in wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) genotypes a field experiment was done during 2017 and 2018 at two different locations Rara and Danna of Muzaffarabad. Hundred wheat genotypes were investigated by using simple lattice design with 4 replications. Analysis of the observations for nine morphological traits was carried out at 0.05 probability. Result: High values for phenotypic coefficient of variation (PCV) and genotypic coefficient of variation (GCV) were noted for grain yield (16.44 and 17.07%) and (14.75 and 15.94%) at both locations, separately. High heritability were obtained for plant height (98.80%) harvest index (96.84), thousand grain weight (95.47), spike length (94.91) and grain yield (92.80) at Rara and plant height (98.09), thousand grain weight (95.66), harvest index (93.32) and number of grain (91.28) at Danna. High genetic advance values were noted for number of tiller (53.45 and 42.89) at both locations. It is concluded from this research that estimation of the variability, heritability and genetic advance in the wheat genotypes (Triticum aestivum L.) is important in the plant breeding, because it might be used for improvement of novel varieties by breeders of wheat at relevant location.
Forest regeneration is a thrust area of vegetation studies having important implications and contributions for sustainable forest management. Regeneration pattern was investigated in western Himalayan moist temperate and subtropical forest sites in Bagh district, Azad Jammu and Kashmir. The anthropogenic pressure in terms of grazing and tree felling intensity was investigated. A very low regeneration values of 121 seedlings/ha was recorded for the whole area. Subtropical forests showed relatively higher regeneration value of 211 seedlings/ha. The seedling count for moist temperate forest sites was calculated as 119/ha. Stem/stump value of 1.62 was recorded for the forest stands showing immense tree felling intensity. Available grazing area per grazing unit was calculated as 0.16ha/grazing unit whereas average herd size was 3. Persistent grazing activity was recorded at all of the investigated forest sites. Multivariate statistical analyses revealed that anthropogenic disturbance stimuli were significantly correlated with retarded forest regeneration patterns. A gradual decline in tree felling and grazing intensity was observed with increasing altitude and distance from settlements; followed with an increase in seedling count.
We explore whether foreign direct investment outflows augment or obstruct public or private capital in developing countries by decomposing domestic capital into private and public capital. While developed countries are the primary source of foreign direct investment outflows (FDIOs), developing economies have become the primary source of FDIO over the past 30 years. We apply cross-sectional autoregressive distributed lag (CS-ARDL) methods to overcome the issue of endogeneity and cross-sectional dependency in our dataset. This study analyzes the interaction effects of foreign direct investment and institutional quality (IQ) in promoting aggregate domestic capital formation in developing countries. Our empirical results show that FDI outflows augment private capital formation and additionally, IQ also upsurges private capital formation. Conversely, as per results, FDI outflows obstruct public capital formation, and IQ crowds out public capital formation significantly while private capital crowds out FDI inflows. As per result estimations, we notice that FDIO crowds in private capital formation, thus we conclude that the private sector controls the majority of the sectors for developing countries and the role of the public sector is quite minimal. We conclude that private and public capital possess different attributes; thus clubbing them together might result in aggregation bias. Our result estimations provide several useful policy implications.
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