The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on transportation employment: A comparative analysis

Perceived advantages and drawbacks of teleworking during the economic crisis and COVID-19: A cross-sectional study among university degree holders

This study aimed to identify the perceived advantages and drawbacks of teleworking and their correlates, including health problems, among Lebanese workers holding a university degree. A web-based cross-sectional self-report questionnaire created on Google Forms was used to survey 230 participants through snowball sampling between October 2022 and March 2023. The majority of respondents recognized both the advantages (67.03%) and drawbacks (66.34%) associated with teleworking, suggesting mixed feelings toward this format. Despite the limited satisfaction with teleworking, respondents acknowledged the advantages associated with remote working; in particular, younger, less physically active, and more educated participants valued teleworking more than their counterparts. The mean perception of advantages and drawbacks of telework did not significantly change with participants' work status (hybrid, online, and in-person). The study revealed a high prevalence of consistent sleeping difficulty (35.7%), limited regular physical activity (60.4%), work-related musculoskeletal disorders (48.7%), back pain (5.7%), and visual disorders (48%) among Lebanese workers. Despite the limited satisfaction with teleworking, respondents acknowledged advantages such as cost and time savings. Older workers showed a preference against teleworking, potentially due to its impact on well-being. Factors such as education, career satisfaction, and prior teleworking experience influenced individuals' perceptions of telework benefits.

Increasing vaccine uptake among employees within the non-health related critical infrastructure sectors: A review

This review aimed to identify barriers to employee vaccination, motivators for vaccination, and vaccine uptake strategies within the critical infrastructure sectors. We focused on non-healthcare-related sectors, including food and agriculture, manufacturing, and education where employee vaccination is rarely mandated. We conducted a search for literature published from 2012 to 2022 from MEDLINE-PubMed, PsycINFO, and Web of Science Core Collection, which resulted in 22 studies that met the inclusion criteria. We found that 1) barriers to vaccination differ by infectious disease and population; 2) common motivators for vaccination were about protecting self, family, and community; and 3) common uptake strategies for influenza (which accounted for 83% of uptake strategies in reviewed studies) addressed convenience and confidence barriers such as vaccination cost and education. Our review highlights the need for employers, policymakers, and researchers to identify infectious disease and population-specific barriers to vaccination and implement strategies aimed at addressing the identified barriers.

COVID-19 pandemic and air transportation: Summary of Recent Research, Policy Consideration and Future Research Directions

The COVID-19 pandemic can be considered an unparalleled disruption to the aviation industry in the last century. Starting with an at-that-time inconceivable reduction in the number of flights from March 2020 to May 2020, the aviation industry has been trying to navigate through and out of the crisis. This process is accompanied with a significant number of scientific studies, reporting on the direct and indirect impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on aviation and vice versa. This paper reviews the impacts in context of the recent literature. We have collected nearly 200 well-published papers on the subject in the years 2021/2022 and dissected them into a framework of eight categories, built around: airlines, airports, passengers, workforce, markets, contagion, sustainability, and economics. We highlight the essence of findings in the literature and derive a set of future research directions and policy considerations which we deem important on the way towards pandemic-resilient aviation.

CO2 emissions in the USA: new insights based on ANN approach

The paper's main aim is to forecast the carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions in the USA and its related components, analysing the contributions of each of those components to CO₂ total volume. The empirical ground is a mix of non-linear tools, combining the artificial neural network (ANN) parametric method with a vector autoregressive (VAR) estimator. ANN includes 1 layer and 20 neurons, forecasting being based on the economic growth and net trade effects doubled by different types of renewable energy consumption. The accuracy of estimations for 14 targeted categories of CO₂ emissions is ensured by 4360 observations, with 10 types of inputs over 1984M01-2020M04. ANN seems to offer superior forecasting accuracy compared with the widely used autoregressive methods, such as VAR model, but seems to be weak in capturing the output 'spike' forms. The main findings show that, although economic growth and net trade have an important contribution to the targeted outputs, the more prominent ones are wind, solar and total biomass energy consumption. Therefore, the CO₂ emissions can be better controlled through non-polluting capacities, in parallel with the use of wind, solar and total biomass energies. The tool excellently predicts the CO₂ emissions during pandemic crises being a good instrument in policy decisions. Modest contributions to CO₂ prediction seem to have energy consumption generated by waste, hydroelectric power and renewable geothermal systems. This underlines an unclear current status given their collateral effects in environmental damages and high investment costs. The paper contributes to the literature in several ways. It is one of the first works focused on CO₂ emissions forecasting in the USA based on a mixed approach by ANN and VAR types, considering an extended pallet of inputs to predict the volume of total CO₂ emissions but also its components. As a novelty, the inputs combine both economic and environmental determinants. Not at least, the estimations are performed based on a large span, with monthly frequency.

Study on the influence of COVID-19 on the growth of China’s small and medium-sized construction enterprises

The outbreak of COVID-19 at the beginning of 2020 had a significant impact on China’s economy, society, and citizens; it also had a negative impact on the development of the construction industry. In particular, small and medium-sized construction enterprises with low ability to withstand risk have been strongly impacted, aggravating a crisis of survival among these firms. The focus of this study is to analyze the impact of COVID-19 on the growth of small and medium-sized construction companies. Based on the characteristics of small and medium-sized construction enterprises, this paper establishes a growth evaluation index and builds a growth evaluation model based on factor analysis. Twenty-three construction enterprises listed on small and medium-sized enterprises board are selected as samples, and the quarterly data of 2019 and 2020 are used for empirical analysis. The results show that the epidemic has had a high short-term impact on construction enterprises, and the total output value of the construction industry in the first quarter of 2020 was 16% lower than that in the same period of last year. In the long run, the impact of the epidemic on the growth of small and medium-sized construction enterprises has been limited. In the first quarter of 2020, the growth score of enterprises decreased by only 1.95% year-over-year, and it was essentially flat in the second and third quarters. The epidemic has had little influence on solvency, tangible resources or intangible resources but a high short term influence on profitability, capital expansion and market expectations. The long-term impact is small; It is conducive to the improvement of enterprise operation ability. Finally, to both address the influence of the COVID-19 on small and medium-sized construction enterprises and to realize their transformation and upgrading, targeted suggestions are offered at the policy and enterprise levels. The results will help to understand the impact of the epidemic on the growth of construction enterprises, and provide decision support for the healthy and orderly development of the follow-up construction industry.

Flow of goods to the shock of COVID-19 and toll-free highway policy: Evidence from logistics data in China

Using high-frequency logistics data from China, this paper quantitatively examines the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on logistics. Meanwhile, our research focuses on the toll-free highway policy during the COVID-19 pandemic, analyzing the promoting effect of this policy on road freight in China. Three main conclusions are drawn from the study. Firstly, the COVID-19 pandemic led to an average daily drop of 0.67% in road freight volume and an increase of 0.48% in logistic cost compared to the pre-pandemic period. Secondly, the toll-free highway policy had a significant offset effect of pandemic on freight volume and price, stimulating the resumption of work and production. However, the dynamic effect shows that the toll-free highway policy is only temporarily effective rather than the long term. Thirdly, the effectiveness of the toll-free highway policy is moderated by the severity of the epidemic and the transportation distance. This paper contributes to research on economy recovery and transportation policy under the COVID-19 pandemic shock.

Measuring the impact of an exogenous factor: An exponential smoothing model of the response of shipping to COVID-19

Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, various lockdown strategies restrained global economic growth bringing a significant decline in maritime transportation. However, the previous studies have not adequately recognized the specific impacts of COVID-19 on maritime transportation. In this study, a series of analyses of the Baltic Dry Index (BDI), the China Coastal Bulk Freight Index (CCBFI) and of container throughputs with and without the impact of COVID-19 were carried out to assess changing trends in dry bulk and container transportation. The results show that global dry bulk transportation was largely affected by lockdown policies in the second month during COVID-19, and BDI presented a year-on-year decrease of approximately 35.5% from 2019 to 2020. The CCBFI showed an upward trend in the second month during COVID-19, one month ahead of the BDI. The container throughputs at Shanghai Port, the Ports of Hong Kong, the Ports of Singapore and the Ports of Los Angeles from 2019 to 2020 presented the largest year-on-year drops of approximately 19.6%, 7.1%, 10.6% and 30.9%, respectively. In addition, the authors developed exponential smoothing models of BDI, CCBFI, and container transportation, and calculated the percentage prediction error between the observed and predicted values to examine the impact of exogenous effects on the shipping industry due to the outbreak of COVID-19. The results are consistent with the conclusions obtained from the comparison of BDI, CCBFI, and container transportation during the same period in 2020 and 2019. Finally, on the basis of the findings, smart shipping and special support policies are proposed to reduce the negative impacts of COVID-19.