Impact of Covid-19 outbreak on Turkish gasoline consumption.

This paper investigates the effects of Covid-19 outbreak on Turkish gasoline consumption by employing a unique data set of daily data covering the 2014-2020 period. Forecast performance of benchmark ARIMA models are evaluated for both before and after the outbreak. Even the best-fit model forecasts fail miserably after the Covid-19 outbreak. Adding volatility improves forecasts. Consumption volatility increases due to the outbreak. Policies targeting volatility can reduce adverse impacts of similar shocks on market participants, tax revenues, and vulnerable groups.

Sharing the costs and benefits of climate change mitigation via Shapley value.

This paper examines the free rider problem that exists in the joint effort to mitigate climate change. There is a need to develop a model that is stable and that provides evidence of an objective burden sharing rule so that the environmental agreement is more acceptable. This study approaches this problem via a cooperative game at the global level to make International Environmental Agreements (IEA) more stable. For this purpose, we apply the Shapley value transfer mechanism and find that under the commitment scenario, some regions attain the maximum benefits by joining the coalition. Shapley value transfer improves the coalition size and increases the global benefits at a certain level of abatement under perfect cooperation. Imperfect cooperation leads to lower levels of global benefits. Our findings offer new implications on how to improve the international cooperation for climate change. Commitments by major regions could activate the IEA (e.g., Paris agreement) efficiently. For the maximum global response to climate change, the national governments must reformulate and implement policies to meet their intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs). The results of this study also help the national governments to set their implementation priorities to implement the Paris Accord at global level.

Physical and ergonomic hazards in the textile, chemical, food, metal products, and woodworking industries in Turkey.

Questionnaires were administered in 272 textile, chemical, food, metal products and woodworking firms in ten cities in industry-dense areas to assess the general OHS situation in Turkey. This paper explores the portion related to exposures of workers to physical and ergonomic hazards. OHS experts where available, firm owners, partners, or engineers responsible for safety were asked to answer structured questions regarding percentages of workers exposed to specific hazards. About 65% of respondents reported exposures to noise risks among at least some percentage of employees; 26.3% reported more than 50% of employees were so exposed. In more than 60% of the firms employees were exposed to ergonomic risks related to the need to meet production quotas and the need to maintain constant posture. The most prevalent risk factors in five industries and the relative frequencies of exposed employees are described.