The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor vision and mission are to improve the people's living standards of Pakistan and China through bilateral investments, trade, cultural exchanges, and economic activities. To achieve this envisioned dream, Pakistan established the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor Authority to further its completion, but Covid-19 slowed it down. This situation compelled the digitalization of CPEC. This article reviews the best practices and success stories of various digitalization and e-governance programs and, in this light, advises the implementation of the Ajman Digital (...) Governance model as a theoretical framework for CPEC digitalization. This article concludes that the Pakistani government needs to transform CPEC digitalization by setting up the CPEC Digitalization and Transformation Center at the CPECA office to attract more investors and businesses. (shrink)

The impetus of this study is to gauge the nexus between economic policy uncertainty and financial innovation in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa nations for the period from 2004M1 to 2018M12. This study utilizes both the linear and non-linear autoregressive distributed lag models to evaluate the long-run and the short-run association between EPU and financial innovation; furthermore, the causal effects are investigated by following the non-Granger casualty framework. The results of long-run cointegration, i.e., the test statistics of modified (...) F-test, standard Wald test, and tBDM, reject the null hypothesis and establish the presence of the long-run association between EPU and financial innovation. Conversely, long-run asymmetry cointegration revealed the test statistics of FPSS, WPSS, and tBDM in non-linear estimation. Furthermore, both in the long run and short run, the Wald test results disclose asymmetric effects running from EPU to financial innovation. In regards to the asymmetric impact of EPU on financial innovation, this study documents that the positive and negative shocks in EPU are negatively linked with financial innovation in the long run but are insignificant for short-run effects. Besides, financial innovation measured by R&D investment exhibits a positive linkage with shocks in EPU, implying that uncertainty induces innovation in the economy. Referring to causality effects, this study divulges the feedback hypothesis, i.e., bidirectional causality prevails between EPU and financial innovation in all sample countries. (shrink)

Involvement in sustainable development is a voluntary activity. Organizations apply the principles of sustainable development only when they identify several benefits. These benefits are identified, especially with the financial ones. The involvement of organizations in sustainable organizations has different intensity levels. These intensity levels are influenced by psychosocial factors, attitudes toward organizational risks, and organizational and urban policies. The present paper identifies the key psychological factors involved in applying organizational sustainability principles within organizations. For this research, five groups were created (...) for in-depth interviews with key people from Romania’s innovative companies. To identify the importance of the framework analysis factors, the Delphi method was used, in which 20 experts from different fields of activity were involved. Following the rounds involved in the Delphi method, the ranking of PF on four levels of importance was accepted, based on planned behavior and reasoned action theory. These levels were correlated with the intensity levels of involvement in sustainable development. The entire market study was conducted during COVID-19, which significantly impacted specific directions. As a result, it could be observed that motivation, learning attitude, behavior, and intention to take precedence are essential in the organizational sustainability approach. (shrink)

Introduction There is a paramount need for moral development for pharmacists and pharmacy students to practice the patient-centered profession. We aimed to explore the current situational judgment utilizing ethical reasoning among undergraduate pharmacy students. Methods A set of ten ethical dilemmas, representing potential real-life situations that the students come across in the university and may face in the future as a pharmacist were developed by a team of students, academic staff, and stakeholders. These ethical dilemmas were validated, checked for accuracy, (...) and piloted. An online questionnaire was created consisting of these ten scenarios as open-ended questions and administered to fourth year and fifth year PharmD students in a public university located at the city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, asking them how they would react in that situation. Responses of the participants were analyzed using thematic analysis independently by four researchers and inter-rater agreement were achieved through consensus. Results Out of 205, 186 students completed the questionnaire with a response rate of 90.7%. Analysis and resulted in the generation of 32 codes, which were then categorized into seven overarching themes: student engagement, social and professional responsibility, academic integrity, legal obligation, moral obligation, signposting, and moral engagement and patient safety. Conclusions Undergraduate pharmacy students experience complex state of mind in connection with ethical reasoning. The participants’ situational judgment were driven by cultural norm, authority, and responsibility. Student engagement is also affected by the state of mind and feelings of mutual trust, perceived cultural influence and peer pressure. The students were prone to seek help from university administrators or teachers when faced with situations in which they were helpless. (shrink)

This communique presents the Q-S synchronization of two nonidentical complex nonlinear hyperchaotic systems with unknown parameters. An adaptive controller based on adaptive integral sliding mode control and parameter update laws are designed to realize the synchronization and parameter identification to a given map vector. The aforementioned strategy’s employment demands the transformation of a system into a specific structure containing a nominal part and some unknown terms. An integral sliding mode controller is used to stabilize the error system by designing nominal (...) control accompanied by compensator control. For chattering suppression, a continuous compensator of smooth nature is used instead of conventional control. The stability of the proposed algorithm is established in an impressive way, using Lyapunov criteria. A numerical simulation is performed to illustrate the validity of the proposed synchronization scheme. (shrink)

The hybridization of two or more energy sources into a single power station is one of the widely discussed solutions to address the demand and supply havoc generated by renewable production, heating power, and cooling power) and its energy storage issues. Hybrid energy sources work based on the complementary existence of renewable sources. The combined cooling, heating, and power is one of the significant systems and shows a profit from its low environmental impact, high energy efficiency, low economic investment, and (...) sustainability in the industry. This paper presents an economic model of a microgrid system containing the CCHP system and energy storage considering the energy coupling and conversion characteristics, the effective characteristics of each microsource, and energy storage unit is proposed. The random forest regression model was optimized by the gravitational search algorithm. The test results show that the GSA-RFR model improves prediction accuracy and reduces the generalization error. The detail of the MG network and the energy storage architecture connected to the other renewable energy sources is discussed. The mathematical formulation of energy coupling and energy flow of the MG network including wind turbines, photovoltaic, CCHP system, fuel cell, and energy storage devices are presented. The testing system has been analysed under load peak cutting and valley filling of energy utilization index, energy utilization rate, the heat pump, the natural gas consumption of the microgas turbine, and the energy storage unit. The energy efficiency costs were observed as 88.2% and 86.9% with heat pump and energy storage operation comparing with GSA-RFR-based operation costs as 93.2% and 93% in summer and winter season, respectively. The simulation results extended the rationality and economy of the proposed model. (shrink)