Nazia Nazeer

The current study examines the impact of global financial crises on the capital structure of engineering small and medium enterprises in Pakistan. The study takes GDP as an indicator of financial crises and total debt to total asset ratio, long-term debt to total debt ratio and long-term debt to total asset ratio as indicators of capital structure. The study mainly focuses on panel data from 5 years by including pre and post-crisis periods. The sample size of the study is 20 engineering small and medium enterprises in Pakistan. The research uses inferential statistical techniques to extract results. The findings depict that the financial crises have an insignificant effect on the capital structure of engineering small and medium enterprises in Pakistan. Moreover, by analyzing the statistics, we see that debt financing is frequently decreasing in engineering small and medium enterprises in Pakistan after the occurrence of this financial crisis globally.

This study investigates the role of institutions in Pakistan’s efforts to stimulate technological progress, specifically analysing the evolution of institutional quality, technology transfer through technical cooperation grants, technological progress and economic growth. The role of institutional quality is emphasised, as proactive institutional coordination is paramount to achieve technological upgrading. As the evidence amassed shows, Pakistan’s institutional quality ranks lower than the successful industrialisers of East Asia, such as Japan, Korea and Taiwan. To ensure the robustness of our findings, data from 1996 to 2020 was deployed. The findings underscore the importance of policymakers in Pakistan directing their attention to fostering skills and competencies essential for patents or cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset, underlining the critical role of strong institutions in this process.

The current study unveils Pakistan’s dates palm fruit sector and explores new export avenues beyond India. Using panel data of 17 trading partners of Pakistan, spanning 1998 to 2021, to uncover key drivers of Pakistan's dates palm fruit exports, the current study applied the Gravity model. Findings underscore the pivotal roles of Pakistan's GDP, partner country GDP and population, distance, and exchange rates in shaping export dynamics. Interestingly, the study highlights untapped opportunities in global markets, showing more substantial export potential for dates palm fruit in Non-Asian regions compared to Asia and neighboring countries. Promising destinations include Germany, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, and the USA, suggesting a pathway for significant market expansion.

In the face of climate change and environmental degradation, reducing emission of greenhouse gases has become a key factor for environmental sustainability. Therefore, the present research is intended to explore the roles of renewable energy consumption, institutional quality, technological innovation, and GDP on carbon dioxide emissions in the 14 EU countries. In doing so, this study employed novel method of moments quantile regression (MMQR) using annual data from 2000 to 2019. Also, a number of other estimators were applied for robustness check including the fully modified ordinary least square (FMOLS), the dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS), and the fixed effect ordinary least square (FE-OLS). The empirical findings indicate that renewable energy consumption significantly reduces CO₂ emissions across all quantiles (0.1–0.9). Furthermore, institutional quality and technological innovation improve environmental quality in 0.1–0.7 quantiles, although GDP enhances carbon emissions significantly in all quantiles. In addition, the FMOLS, DOLS, and FE-OLS results confirmed the MMQR results. The outcomes of this study suggest insights for the policymakers to mitigate carbon emissions through promoting innovative technologies for environmental protection and investing more in the development of renewable energy.

This study investigated the effect of technology and government policies on carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions in 36 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries from 1994 to 2015. This empirical investigation uses econometric models, such as panel quantile regression and ordinary least squares (OLS). The research uses the method proposed by Lin and Ng in 2015 to deal with parameter heterogeneity across countries that identified two separate groups. The empirical results indicated that Gross Domestic Product (GDP), fossil fuel consumption, industrialisation and taxation to GDP intensify CO₂ emissions. In contrast, urbanisation (% of the total population), environmental patents, and environmental tax as a percentage of total tax reduce CO₂ gas emissions. Estimates with homogeneity preserve the signs of the parameters but reveal substantial differences in intensity and that environmental tax revenues (as % of GDP and % of tax) are only statistically significant for our studied group 1. The conclusions of this study have important policy implications. The effect of industrialisation on environmental degradation is an observable fact. When the country reaches the allowable thresholds, it needs to maximize energy consumption. Policymakers should design policies that help them to promote environmentally sustainable economic growth by imposing and accumulating environmental taxes. In addition, environmental taxes, the discharge system and credit could support the modification of in-industrial structures and modes of economic growth. Policymakers should also use policies that encourage trade in nuclear-generated electricity to neighbouring OECD countries.