The health and wellness of people through life expectancy, mortality rate improvement, and sustaining the productivity of labor contributes a lot to national income. Infrastructure development consumes energy and releases carbon dioxide at different stages of the construction process. The current study explores the nexus between CO₂ emission, energy consumption, mortality, life expectancy, and GDP in the top five carbon-emitting countries by using time series data from 1975 to 2015. The study used a cointegration technique to find the long- and short-run relationships between study variables. The study also used a structural break test to identify the break time. The results of the correlation matrix show strong positive correlation between CO₂ emissions and energy consumption. It also reflects a weak correlation with mortality and life expectancy in Japan and Russia. The results of the ADF test indicated that the series are stationary at first difference and provided evidence to use Johansen cointegration test for long- and short-run relationships between independent series. Vector error correction term and ECT method are used to find long-run relationships between cointegrated series and adjustment parameters. For the structural breaks of health indicators and energy consumption study, we used the Gregory Hanson structural break. Mortality rate and life expectancy rate of China, U.S., Russia, India, and Japan show relevant policy changes with economic policies of each country.

In the recent past, the world in general and Pakistan in particular faced a drastic fuel price change, affecting the economic productivity of the country. This has drawn the attention of empirical researchers to analyze the abrupt change in fuel prices. This study takes a lead and investigates for the first time, in the literature related to Pakistan, the presence of multiple fuel price bubbles, with the purpose of knowing if the price driver is due to demand or it is exuberant consumer behavior that prevails and contributes to a sudden boom in fuel price series. The empirical analysis is performed through a recently proposed state-of-the-art generalized sup ADF (GSADF) approach on six commonly used fuel price series, namely, LDO (light diesel oil), HSD (high-speed diesel), petrol, natural gas, kerosene, and MS (motor spirit). The bubble analysis for each of the six fuel price series is based on monthly data from July 2005 to August 2020. The findings provide evidence of the existence of multiple bubbles in all series considered. Specifically, four bubbles are detected in each of the kerosene and natural gas price series, whereas three bubbles are noted in each of the HSD, LDO, petrol and MS price series. The maximum duration of occurrence of bubbles is of 12 months for kerosene. The date-stamping of the bubbles shows that the financial crisis of 2008 contributed to the emergence of bubbles that pushed oil prices upward and caused a depreciation in the national currency.

Hingol National Park (HNP), in Baluchistan, Pakistan, is rich in biodiversity and has a variety of eco-services and marine eco-services. It has dune and mountain habitats that provide a significant environment for wildlife, including amphibians, dolphins, green marine turtles, and migratory birds, but the number of species is declining. HNP faces many problems such as unregulated tourism and lack of a budget to protect and conserve precious wildlife. The study used a negative binomial regression model and a zero-truncated regression model to estimate the visitors’ travel demand and recreational value of the National Park by collecting a sample of 210 respondents.. The study estimated a consumer surplus of USD 270 per person per visit and thus a total annual recreational value of the park at USD 35.11 million. Since the elasticity of demand is low, the study suggests the imposition of an entrance fee of USD 0.86 (PKR 100) that would generate an annual revenue of USD 113,000. It is recommended that both provisional and federal governments should take the necessary steps to maintain and promote heritage tourism in the region by reshaping the national parks for the protection of scarce natural resources and the protection of biodiversity.

Pertanika Journal information and guidelines

The Government of Pakistan introduced smoking ordinance about health warning in 2009. This ordinance exhibits, prohibit smoking in public places, put restrictions on advertisements, and prohibits sale of cigarettes to minors. This study is to find out the impact of smoking expenditures on food, health, educational, recreational, and electronic expenditures using HIES dataset for 2010–11 and 2015–16. The findings show that share of food and health expenditure increase by 91 and 92% respectively. On the other hand, education and recreation expenditure decrease by 6 and 98% respectively. This is further verified using SUEST test to compare two datasets regressions. The result reveals that food, health, and recreational coefficient are statistically different while education and electronics expenditure remain similar.