Industrial development, agricultural growth, urbanization and environmental Kuznets curve in Pakistan

The debate of environmental issues and their analysis is of vital interest for economic policies. Institutions are engaged in identifying and estimating the extent of environmental impact of determinants controllable via policy measures. Annual data from the on Carbon Dioxide emission, economic growth, consumption of energy, openness for foreign trade, urbanization, industrial growth and agriculture growth on Pakistan is used for 1971 to 2007. Augmented Vector Autoregression technique and cointegration analysis is implemented to test Granger causality. Gross domestic product significantly Granger causes emission of Carbon Dioxide and energy consumption. On the other hand emissions of CO2 affect economic growth, agriculture and industrial growth in the long run. It is also evident that energy consumption unidirectional Granger causes emission of Carbon Dioxide. Industrialization and urbanization bidirectional Granger causes each other. The results indicate the more careful industrial and energy policies to reduce emissions and control global warming.Pakistan, Carbon Dioxide emission, Environment, Energy Consumption, Economic Growth, Foreign Trade

The small and medium enterprises Act as catalyst for economic growth and development in Pakistan: Economic growth and development perspective

This paper explores the value of small and medium enterprises for the economic growth and development especially in Pakistan. Moreover, it assesses the usage of information technology in SMEs sector of Pakistan. According to the recent Census of Establishments conducted by the Federal Bureau of Statistics (FBS) there are about 3.2 million economic establishments in Pakistan. Out of these Small & Medium sized enterprises (SMEs) (with employment base up to 99) constitute 90% of all private enterprises employing approximately 78% of non-agriculture labor force1. SMEs contributed over 30% to GDP, 25% in export earnings besides sharing 35% in manufacturing value addition2. The paper suggests that SMEs act as a catalyst to economical growth and development where IT embedded in their operations, planning and decisions like Hong Kong, Denmark and USA. Many other societies also place great value on the small and medium enterprises and encourage their activity. In fact, wealth and a high majority of jobs are created by small & medium businesses in the world. As a result, many experienced business people, political leaders, economists, and educators believe that fostering a robust small and medium business culture will maximize individual and collective economic and social success on a local, national, and global scale. It is recommended that SMEs may be offered access to inexpensive capital, tax exemptions and management advice & experiences and IT infrastructure which further leads toward the economical growth & development. The economical growth and development in a country can brings happiness and prosperity to its nation

Fiscal Deficits and Debt Dimensions of Pakistan

Pakistan continues to suffer from a syndrome of high fiscal deficits and severe incidence of debt. Its annual fiscal deficit has stayed constantly at over 6 percent of GDP especially since 1990 [Pakistan (1997-98)]. The prevalence of such a high fiscal deficit over the years in a row has propelled increased borrowing from both internal and external sources to cover the resource gap. With inadequate improvement in the repayment capacity of the country debt has continued to accumulate at a massive rate. Serving as the cause and effect of each other, the volumes of both the fiscal deficit and debt have soared continuously. The most devastating consequence of high fiscal deficit and soaring debt has been the continuous accrual of massive debt-servicing. In fact, both the debt and debt-servicing have reached unaffordable limits. How to alleviate this situation has become the foremost issue of the country. While complete elimination of all the debt and thereby debt-servicing may not be easy to accomplish in the short run, efforts are needed to systematically bring the fiscal deficit down to a minimum affordable limit. What may be the minimum financeable level of fiscal deficit and how it may be reduced to that level are the issues addressed in this paper.

Modulational instability in binary spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensates

We study modulation instability (MI) of flat states in two-component spin-orbit-coupled (SOC) Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) in the framework of coupled Gross-Pitaevskii equations for two components of the pseudospinor wave function. The analysis is performed for equal densities of the components. Effects of the interaction parameters, Rabi coupling, and SOC on the MI are investigated. In particular, the results demonstrate that the SOC strongly alters the commonly known MI (immiscibility) condition, $g_{12} > g_{1} g_{2}$, for the binary superfluid with coefficients $g_{1,2}$ and $g_{12}$ of the intra- and interspecies repulsive interactions. In fact, the binary BEC is always subject to the MI under the action of the SOC, which implies that the ground state of the system is plausibly represented by a striped phase

Synthesis and characterization of metal sulfates loaded palm empty fruit bunch for biodiesel production

Biodiesel has been globally accepted as a green substitute for diesel fuel. It is obtained from renewable sources such as vegetable oils and animal fats. Recently, the application of edible sources in the production of biodiesel has caused a lot of debate due to the insecurity of food. The alternative feasible technique is the use of inedible and low-grade sources such as palm fatty acid distillate (PFAD). Although it could be the answer to more economic biodiesel, its high free fatty acid (FFA) content causes biodiesel production commercially unfavorable when homogeneous catalysts are used. Hence, the development and use of heterogeneous acid catalysts, obtained from biomass waste are most economically viable to produce biodiesel from low-grade feedstocks. In this work, the production of biodiesel (FAME) from PFAD using solid acid catalysts (SACs) derived from palm empty fruit bunch (PEFB) is investigated. The SACs were synthesized through impregnation of different metal sulfate precursors, i.e. ferrous sulfate heptahydrate (FeSO4.7H2O), copper sulfate pentahydrate (CuSO4.5H2O) and magnesium sulfate heptahydrate (MgSO4.7H2O) over PEFB. Scanning Electron Microscopy-Energy Dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM-EDX) observations found that impregnation-calcination resulted in attachment of sulfur (S) and improved surface porosity. Fourier Transform Infra-Red (FT-IR) showed that there were different interactions between metal sulfates and PEFB. X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) found that the synthesized SACs have a crystalline structure. FePEFB catalyst showed the highest acid density (2.44 mmol/g) among the catalysts studied. In order to evaluate the catalytic performance of the catalysts, the esterification of PFAD was carried out. Finally, optimization of process variables was conducted to study the effect of methanol : PFAD molar ratio, catalyst dosage, reaction temperature and reaction time on FFA conversion (%). Maximum FFA conversion of 89.13% was obtained over Fe-PEFB at 14:1 methanol : PFAD molar ratio, 7 wt.% catalyst dosage, at 70 °C and 6 hours of reaction time. Thus, the present study offers a sustainable and environmentally benign method for biodiesel production