European Union Allowances (EUAs) are rights to emit CO₂ that may be sold or bought by enterprises. They were originally created to try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, although they have become assets that may be used by financial intermediaries to seek for new business opportunities. Therefore, forecasting the time evolution of their price is very important for agents involved in their selling or buying. Neural Networks, an artificial intelligence paradigm, have been proved to be accurate and reliable tools for time series forecasting, and have been widely used to predict economic and energetic variables; two of them are used in this work, the Multilayer Preceptron (MLP) and the Long Short-Term Memories (LSTM), along with another artificial intelligence algorithm (XGBoost). They are combined with two preprocessing tools, decomposition of the time series into its trend and fluctuation and decomposition into Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMF) by the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD). The price prediction is obtained by adding those from each subseries. These two tools are combined with the three forecasting tools to provide 20 future predictions of EUA prices. The best results are provided by MLP-EMD, which is able to achieve a Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 2.91% for the first predicted datum and 5.65% for the twentieth, with a mean value of 4.44%.

Entrepreneurship and Sustainability Issues is a peer-reviewed journal which publishes original research papers and case studies

Purpose: In Argentina, soy and maize represent 28% of the total country exports, affecting the balance of payments, international reserves accumulation and sovereign credit risk. In the past 10 years, three extreme and moderate droughts have affected the agricultural areas, causing significant losses in soybean and maize production. This study aims to estimate the economic impact generated by different drought levels for soy and maize production areas through a financial perspective that allows the estimation of the cash flow and income losses. Design/methodology/approach: By analyzing the extreme deviations in yields during dry periods, the losses generated by droughts were valuated among 183 departments nationwide. Findings: The aggregated results indicated a total loss of US$24.170m, representing 57.45% of the international reserves of the Argentinean Central Bank in 2021. This estimate shows the magnitude of the climate impact on the Argentinean economy, indicating that severe droughts have macroeconomic impacts, with the external sector as the main transmission channel in an economy with historic restrictions on the balance of payments, international reserve accumulation and sovereign credit risk. Originality/value: This study analyses the macroeconomic impact of drought on Argentinean soybean and maize production.

In the last decades, there has been a growing interest in measuring the efficiency of hospitals using different methodological approaches, mainly represented by data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA). In this study, we estimate efficiency measures of performance for a sample of Panamanian public hospitals over an 11‐year period (2005–2015) using both traditional methods (DEA and SFA) and compare them with efficiencies estimated with an alternative approach, the so‐called StoNED (stochastic semi‐nonparametric envelopment of data), which combines the virtues of those methods in a unified framework. One of the most interesting features of the public health system in Panama is that it is segmented, as hospitals are operating under two parallel management schemes (the Ministry of Health and the Social Security Fund), thus in our empirical analysis we will also focus on exploring the differences between hospitals operating under each regime. Our results show that there are certain divergences in the efficiency scores estimated with different methodologies, but for all of them it is possible to detect that Panamanian hospitals experienced a clear decrease in their efficiency levels throughout the period evaluated, being this much higher in the hospitals belonging to the Social Security Fund.

Cities are territories vulnerable to climate change. An alternative to increase resilience and mitigate the effects of the climate context is urban forest planning to increase ecosystem services. This research constructed a forest cover sustainability index, based on 147 semi-structured interviews with residents of four residential areas of the city of Santo Domingo (Gazcue, Zona Colonial, Ciudad Nueva, and San Carlos), in which information was collected based on both benefit perception and tree management in their home and nearby public areas. The socioeconomic characteristics of the population and the information gathered from the measurements of the urban forest in both public and private areas of the city during the 2016–2019 period were considered, including these four residential areas, which established the ecosystem services provided by the urban forest. The results showed that Gazcue had a higher value in the forest cover sustainability index. The factors that influenced this result were: job stability, medium-high income, and property ownership. Likewise, the added value of the territory, whether in terms of tourism or the socioeconomic value of the population that inhabits it, is closely related to a greater attention to urban planning, prioritizing the conservation and landscape harmony that the arboreal component can provide. In conclusion, urban forest planning in cities should consider tree species, the design and structure of spatial arrangements, and a competent legal framework that can meet the challenges of territorial sustainability and contribute to the resilience and mitigation of climate change impacts.

Evidence, whether international or national, of the significance of the links between budget deficits and interest rates, is in general terms inconclusive. The aim of the present work is to contribute new findings for the Spanish economy using annual data for the period 1964–2000. It is found that budget deficits did not appear to raise long-run nominal interest rates during our sample period.