Linking CO2 Emissions and Crop Production: Empirical Evidence from South Asian Countries

It is need of the hour to investigate the impacts of climate parameters on agricultural production in a developing region of South Asia. Therefore, this work attempts to explore the climatic indicators on agricultural production for selected South Asian countries over the annual data of 1961–2016. This study estimates the impacts of rainfall, temperature, rural population, land under cereal production, and CO2 emissions on agricultural production. For empirical analysis, we applied second-generation unit root tests. After examining the order of integration of time series, we check for the co-integration among the variables. Before the co-integration test, we check for cross-section dependence among the variables. CD and LM tests confirm the existence of cross-section dependence. Afterward, we apply Westerlud co-integration test to confirm the strong association among the variables. Further, we applied two methods for long-run coefficients of independent variables. DOLS and FMOLS tests were applied to cross-check the findings. Our findings show that rural population and rainfall are negatively associated with agricultural production. Moreover, temperature, land area under cereal production, and CO2 emissions are positively associated with agricultural production. Our findings shed light on some important policy implications for South Asian countries.

IMPROVED ANISOTROPIC LINEAR SOURCE FORMULATION FOR MULTIPHYSICS PROBLEMS

This work seeks to extend an existing formulation of the method of characteristics with linear source approximation for problems with dynamic cross sections. The previous formulation eliminated cross section dependence of precomputed coefficients for systems with an isotropic source. The method is extended to include a formulation for spatially flat anisotropic scattering that eliminates cross section dependence of precomputed coefficients without adding additional operations; increasing efficiency in multiphysics simulations where cross sections can be subject to change. The new formulation is implemented in the MPACT code and tested on two problems: 3D transport assembly calculations using MPACT’s 2D/1D method and a 3D assembly with T/H feedback using MPACT’s 2D/1D method coupled with COBRA-TF. This work demonstrates that the new linear source formulation allows for the number of mesh elements to be significantly reduced while maintaining accuracy, leading to shorter run-times for 3D cases with fixed cross sections, and substantial reduction of memory usage for 3D cases with fixed cross sections. The multiphysics calculations show similar runtimes for the same accuracy with significant reduction of memory. For similar accuracy, the method proved effective in reducingmemory usage by, on average, 30% for 3D problems and 21% for multiphysics problems.

Regional Growth, Domestic and Foreign Tourism in NUTS Regions: New Insights from the Old Continent

Using regional data encompassing 155 Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) regions across the EU-28 member states, we estimate the effect of tourist arrivals (total, domestic, and foreign) on regional growth over 2000-2018. Our empirical strategy tackles three data properties that cripple common econometric approaches: cross-section dependence, nonstationarity, and the endogeneity of the regressors. In addition to “pooled” models that assume common parameters across regions, we run “heterogeneous” models where parameters are allowed to differ between regions. Results of the pooled estimations show that domestic and total tourism inflows have positively and significantly contributed to growth, and the positive effect of foreign tourism is statistically discernible in regions that are mainly destinations for foreign tourists. Findings based on region-specific regressions reveal that the average impact on regional growth of tourist inflows is positive and significant, and large regional disparities in terms of the growth impact of domestic/foreign tourism exist.