درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

In addition to imposing a negative impact on public health, Covid-19 has made the world face a huge financial-economic crisis. The worldwide spread of the coronavirus has also affected the volume of transactions and the value of stocks. Since the food market is more affected under crisis conditions, this relationship has been investigated in the stock exchange in the present study. In order to investigate the effect of Covid-19 patients on the stock index value of food industry companies as well as the relationship between risk and stock index value, the official daily data of the Ministry of Health and Medical Education and the Financial Information Processing Center of Iran were collected from March 3, 2021 when the first report was announced, to June 2, 2021. Mean Conditional heteroscedasticityvariance regression models were used in the current study. The statistical model specification tests showed that, first, the assumption of heteroscedasticitywas rejected and the needto useheteroscedasticitymodels was proved. Secondly, the asymmetry assumption was accepted. Model estimation results showed a relationship between the numbers of Covid-19 patients with the stock value of the food industry that was an increase in the number of infected people causes a decrease in the stock value of the food industry. Therefore, like other economic sectors, the capital market was affected by the Covid-19 crisis, and increasing exchange rate as a competing market had a negative effect on the stock price index. Also, considering the relationship between risk and stock value of food industries, as expected, there was an inverse and significant relationship between risk and stock value of food industry companies. In other words, an increase in risk leads to a decrease in the stock price of food industries.

Environment quality and its determinants are one of the main challenges of the present and future of humanity and sustainable development is interpreted in the direction of preserving and improving the environment. In recent years, many studies have been conducted on the factors affecting environmental quality. One of the main topics that have been less considered in the related studies is the impact of governance on the quality of the environment. In this study, the impact of good governance components, including economic freedom, trade freedom, and political freedom, on the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) and its sub-indices including environmental health, ecosystem vitality, and climate change is investigated. The data required for statistical analysis are related to Middle East and North Africa region countries and Turkiye (MENAT) during 2000-2021. The panel data method was used to estimate the model and examine the relationship between the variables. The findings show that there is a positive and significant relationship between economic freedom and political freedom with the environmental performance index (EPI), and there is no significant relationship between trade freedom and EPI. </span>In addition, the study found that economic freedom had a detrimental effect on ecosystem vitality and climate change, leading to negative impacts in these areas. However, it had a positive impact on environmental health, indicating that it contributed positively to this aspect. On the other hand, political freedom was observed to have a positive effect on the vitality of the ecosystem and climate change. However, it did not have a significant impact on the overall health of the environment, suggesting that its influence was more prominent in specific areas related to ecosystem vitality and climate change. <span style="layout-grid-mode: line;" data-mce-fragment="1">The result of this research showed that economic freedom has led to more investment in the oil and gas sector of MENA countries, and therefore wastewater and gas emissions have had a negative impact on the vitality of the environment and climate change, but with the increase in production and sales of oil and Gas, per capita income of countries has increased, and environmental health has improved. Also, considering that political freedom among the MENA region has a lot of diversity, the results showed that the countries with more political freedom, through greater awareness of the society and more accountability of the governments and the establishment of environmental protection laws, had a positive impact on the environment. Of course, the environmental health index is more influenced by the economic situation and per capita production of countries and political freedom has little effect on it.