Sayyed Mahdi Ziaei

The economic feasibility and technological improvement to produce biodiesel from microalga, Chlorella vulgaris is investigated. The biodiesel would help Malaysia replace diesel with renewable and sustainable energy in the transportation sector. Accordingly, the Malaysian Agriculture and Plantation Greenhouse Gas Model is modified and extended to incorporate algal farms. The model forecasts Malaysia's market prices and quantities of major agricultural commodities between 2024 and 2064. The simulation results indicate that algal biodiesel is not economically feasible. The biodiesel price must be $0.68 per litre or higher for the algal farms to produce biodiesel. The biodiesel price could be lowered to $0.60 per litre if the algal farms experience a one-percent annual boost in either algal harvest yield or productivity gain. The results indicate that harvest yield improvements boost biodiesel production more than productivity improvements. The feasibility depends on algal farms to dry the leftover slurry and sell it to the animal feed markets. At last, the biodiesel offsets CO2 emissions from the transportation sector while the alga consumes the CO2 from the flue gas of coal and natural gas electric power plants, which help Malaysia sequester high levels of CO2.

This paper explores the relationship between economic freedom and a country’s daily COVID-19 fatalities using a panel data set for a sample ranging between 36 and 168 countries. Economically free countries possess characteristics that make it more resilient and capable of handling a health crisis. Therefore, we hypothesize that economically free countries exhibit lower COVID-19 fatality rates. We use a two-step estimator that estimates parameters with a negative binomial regression in the first step and a nonlinear least squares in the second step. The first step estimates parameters for time-varying variables, while the second step estimates parameters for time-invariant variables. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find a negative relationship between economic freedom and COVID-19 fatality rates even after controlling for a country’s economic growth, medical resources, and life expectancy. Thus, we rule out that this resilience is due to higher economic growth, hospital beds, and healthier citizens. Instead, economically free countries possess a host of characteristics that help them deal with a health crisis. Consequently, policymakers have another incentive to increase economic freedom, which helps a nation to defend against health crises.

This paper introduces two models: the first analyzes the impacts of global economic policy uncertainty, gold prices and three-month US Treasury bill rates on

The objective of this paper is to contribute towards understanding the effects of palm oil production upon key macroeconomic variables in Malaysian economy. A dynamic general equilibrium model was employed in order to analyze the dynamic macroeconomic adjustment processes arising from palm oil production increase for Malaysian economy (the second biggest palm oil producer in world), operating under a managed float exchange rate regime. The model utilized in this paper is likely to be of interest to other palm oil-exporting economies with similar features such as that of Indonesia. Findings from this paper show that an increase in palm oil production would potentially result in an increase in private capital stock, private sector wealth, real income, public capital stock, human capital stock and non-palm oil output supply and demand. However, the revenue arising from the palm oil sector also has the potential to deteriorate the non-palm-oil trade balance through a slight loss of competitiveness from a real exchange rate appreciation.

The economic and environmental impact to produce bioethanol from biomass is investigated in this paper. Accordingly, a partial equilibrium model is employed to study large scale bioethanol production on the Malaysian agricultural sector and gauge secondary effects on the agricultural markets. The model shows the palm oil mills can produce bioethanol competitively and blend with gasoline fuel because the mills utilize the waste biomass created onsite and thus avoid the hauling costs. Furthermore, a large bioethanol industry would help Malaysia reduce its GHG emissions as biomass recycles carbon from the atmosphere and would help Malaysia meet its commitments in the Paris Agreement. A large bioethanol industry also creates a little derived demand for waste biomass that expands the agricultural industry, reduces agricultural prices, raises agricultural employment, and leads to greater forestation as landowners clear rainforests to expand oil palm plantations.

Purpose: This paper aims to constitute to the first empirical work that investigated the effects of US unconventional monetary policy shocks on Islamic equities. Design/methodology/approach: The authors used the spread between sovereign (term spread) and corporate (corporate spread) yields as proxies of unconventional monetary policy in times that FED implemented different rounds of large-scale asset purchasing programs. Findings: This paper demonstrates that monetary policy shocks have significant effects on Islamic equities. The analysis showed substantial evidence that the corporate spread innovation was reflected as a positive signal in Islamic equity markets and has a larger impact on Islamic low leverage equities than term spread. Originality/value: The objective of this paper is to shed some insight into the effects of US unconventional monetary policy on low leverage financial assets. It is hypothesized that during this period, specifically from November 2008, unconventional monetary policy and zero bound interest rates have been implemented in the US economy. However, the strength of effects of this range of policies on Islamic financial products is unidentified.