Tourism is vital to the success of many economies worldwide and has been a widely researched area for many years. Unfortunately, an insufficient number of studies have been conducted on this subject in the context of Saudi Arabia. Therefore, this research investigates the role of tourism in promoting economic growth in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by using annual time series data from 2003 to 2019. The study uses basic statistics, correlation coefficients, the unit root test, the Johansen co-integration test, the co-integration regression test and the Granger causality test to check the relationship between tourism and economic growth. The results show that economic growth has a long-run relationship with tourism receipts, tourism expenditures and the number of tourist arrivals; the number of tourist arrivals has a strong relationship with economic growth, compared to other parameters. The empirical results validate the concept that tourism promotes economic growth in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

We utilize the data of a very large UK automobile loan firm to study the interaction of the characteristics of borrowers and loans in predicting the subsequent loan performance. Our broader findings confirm the earlier research on the issue of subprime auto loans. More importantly, unmarried borrowers living with furnished tenancy agreements who have relatively new jobs have a probability of defaulting of more than 60% compared to an average 7% default rate in overall subprime borrowers in the dataset. Also, in the above category are those who live in a less prosperous part of the UK such as the north-west, are full-time self-employed, have other large loan arrears, fall into the bottom 25% percentile of monthly income, secure loans with high loan to total value (LTV), purchase expensive automobiles with shorter loan duration payment plans, and have a high dependency on government support. This in fact is also true of those who go into arrears, except that the highest probability in this context is around 40% compared to 6% for an overall sample. These findings shall help in the understanding of subprime auto loans performance in relation to borrowers and loan features alongside helping auto finance firms improve predictive models and decision-making.

The experimental values of skin permeability coefficients, required for dermal exposure assessment, are not readily available for many chemicals. The existing estimation approaches are either less accurate or require many parameters that are not readily available. Furthermore, current estimation methods are not easy to apply to complex environmental mixtures. We present two models to estimate the skin permeability coefficients of neutral organic chemicals. The first model, referred to here as the 2-parameter partitioning model (PPM), exploits a linear free energy relationship (LFER) of skin permeability coefficient with a linear combination of partition coefficients for octanol-water and air-water systems. The second model is based on the retention time information of nonpolar analytes on comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GC×GC). The PPM successfully explained variability in the skin permeability data (n = 175) with R² = 0.82 and root mean square error (RMSE) = 0.47 log unit. In comparison, the US-EPA’s model DERMWIN exhibited an RMSE of 0.78 log unit. The Zhang model a 5-parameter LFER equation based on experimental Abraham solute descriptors (ASDs) performed slightly better with an RMSE value of 0.44 log unit. However, the Zhang model is limited by the scarcity of experimental ASDs. The GC×GC model successfully explained the variance in skin permeability data of nonpolar chemicals (n = 79) with R² = 0.90 and RMSE = 0.23 log unit. The PPM can easily be implemented in US-EPA’s Estimation Program Interface Suite (EPI Suite™). The GC×GC model can be applied to the complex mixtures of nonpolar chemicals.

تركز رؤية المملكة العربية السعودية 2030 على التنويع الاقتصادي وتتضمن مبادرات لتعزيز تجربة الحج للسياح الدينيين مع تقليل انبعاثات ثاني أكسيد الكربون. ونظراً للتحديات البيئية التي تفرضها السياحة - وخاصة سياحة الحج - فإن الأبحاث حول تأثيرها على التغير البيئي محدودة. تتناول هذه الدراسة هذه الفجوة من خلال تحليل العلاقات بين انبعاثات ثاني أكسيد الكربون، واستهلاك الطاقة، والنمو الاقتصادي، وسياحة الحج في المملكة العربية السعودية، باستخدام بيانات السلاسل الزمنية السنوية من 1996 إلى 2022. استخدام نموذج تصحيح الخطأ المتجه (VECM) واختبار السببية جرانجر تؤكد النتائج وجود ارتباطات كبيرة طويلة المدى بين هذه المتغيرات. ويظهر اختبار يوهانسن للتكامل المشترك وجود صلة إيجابية بين استهلاك الطاقة ونمو الناتج المحلي الإجمالي، على الرغم من أن الزيادة في أعداد الحجاج الوافدين تؤثر سلبا على انبعاثات الكربون. وعلى وجه التحديد، مع زيادة مستويات ثاني أكسيد الكربون، ينخفض ​​نمو سياحة الحج بنسبة 0.07%، مما يشير إلى تأثير سلبي للتكامل المشترك. تشير نتائج VECM إلى أن النمو الاقتصادي وزيادة الوعي باستهلاك الطاقة يقللان من انبعاثات الكربون،...