The novel COVID-19 has emerged as a severe threat to global health globally, affecting over 210 countries and regions. The profound dilemma interrupted global trade and social activities and enormously influenced daily lives through social distance and confinements. The outbreak of COVID-19 has exacerbated human misery due to the crippling of economies globally. The effects are substantial on health, economy, environment, and society. Nearly every country is trying to prevent the transmission of this communicable disease. Remedial policies include testing and treating patients, isolating suspects through contact tracking, banning public gatherings, and asserting a complete or partial shutdown. In this context, the present paper's core objective is to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the environment and energy market, society, economy, and global protective measures taken to reduce COVID-19 transmission. The study's main contribution is revealed lessons to provide insights for business and the efficacy of governments' initiative globally. Finally, this paper describes future actions for governments, leaders, energy providers, and all stakeholders in response to the global pandemic crisis.

This research attempts to model the association of crude oil imports with several macroeconomic factors such as renewable energy, transport services, trade, industrial value-added, and patents, using Germany’s annual data covering the period of 1990–2020. Employing the Autoregressive Distributed Lag model, this study finds a significant co-integration relationship among targeted variables. Moreover, this study provides empirical evidence on the influence of given macroeconomic factors in determining crude oil imports of Germany. Results reveal that transport services and industrial value-added positively and significantly influence crude oil imports in the long and short run. Similarly, trade is discovered to have a significant positive impact on oil imports only in the long run. In contrast, findings reveal a significant negative association of renewable energy with crude oil imports. Hence, this research implies that the transportation sector and industrial production strongly depend on crude oil consumption. At the same time, promoting renewable energy in these segments could significantly help economies control crude oil demand and achieve sustainability by reducing the economic burden and protecting the environment.

PurposeThe purpose of the research is to analyze the impact of world uncertainty and pandemic uncertainty on Islamic financial markets. For representing Islamic financial markets four different Islamic indices (DJ Islamic index, DJ Islamic Asia–Pacific index, DJ Islamic-Europe index and DJ Islamic-US) are taken.Design/methodology/approachThe study employs quantile-on-quantile regression approach to see the overall dependence structure of variables based on quarterly data ranging from 1996Q1 to 2020Q4. This technique considers how quantiles of world uncertainty and pandemic uncertainty asymmetrically affect the quantiles of Islamic stocks by giving an appropriate framework to apprehend the overall dependence structure.FindingsThe findings of the study confirm a strong negative impact of world uncertainty and world pandemic uncertainty on regional Islamic stock indices but the strength of the relationship varies according to economic conditions and across the regions. However, the world pandemic effect remains the same and does not change. Conversely, pandemic uncertainty has a larger effect on Islamic indices as compared to world uncertainty.Practical implicationsOur findings have significant implications for investors and policymakers to take proper steps before any uncertainty arise. A coalition of the central bank, government officials and investment bank regulators would be needed to tackle this challenge of uncertainty.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors' knowledge, none of the current works has considered the asymmetric impact of world and pandemic uncertainties on Islamic stock markets at both the bottom and upper quantiles of the distribution of data.

No abstract

This research aims to investigate the connection between logistic indicators, trade, renewable energy, and ICT on transport services in the selected 33 developed European countries. The researchers used the panel data from the 33 developed European countries to test the hypothesis. Panel GMM is an optimal modeling choice in this study from data sets ranging from 2007 to 2020. The results revealed that transport services have a significant positive relationship with trade, renewable energy, ICT, and internet usage. Also, the logistic indicators have a significant positive connection with transport services. Furthermore, renewable energy and transport services have a significant positive association with transport services. ICT adoption positively affects road freight transport by enhancing operations’ safety, suitability, visibility, and accountability. The effectiveness of these indicators is considerably affected by transport flow predictions and resource allocation strategy. Moreover, the management of high-quality operations requires optimization, and using transport and logistic management systems for transportation services makes it feasible to get optimal outcomes.