In the international arena, it is often the case that in countries which largely depend on foreign resources, energy security, and its key components i.e. security of energy supply, environment, technology, geopolitical and economic factors, is a subject of concern. However, due to the abundance of fossil fuel resources in resource-rich exporting nations, there is a lack of understanding of the risks around energy security and accordingly often a policy vacuum. https://www.selleckchem.com/products/Cyclopamine.html Conceptualising energy security from different geopolitical vantage points will allow future concerns around energy supply security, climate change, and regional economic crises to be evaluated. By using policy documents and developing a time series approach and normalized z-scores for a range of comparable metrics this article compares the energy security performance in six Caspian Sea countries individually and collectively. The article results show that Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan made significant progress in energy security since 1990, while energy security indicators in Russia, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan regressed. Iran has a leading position in energy security performance, while Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have the lowest level of the energy security indicators compare to other region countries. This article both contributes a replicable definition of energy security that can be undertaken for other global regions, and begins to incorporate diversification and renewables development to enhance domestic energy security assessment.This paper examines the relationship between gold and silver returns in India, using monthly data for the period May 1991 to June 2018. To this end, we employ the recently developed frequency domain rolling-window analysis (which is able to show that transitory high frequency shocks are not equal to permanent low frequency shocks over time), as well as the conditional, partial conditional, difference conditional approaches, in addition to the Toda Yamamoto and frequency domain Granger Causalities methods. Further, the relationship is examined in conditional and unconditional frameworks. To condition the relationship, three macroeconomic variables, namely interest rate, BSE stock index and inflation rate are used as the control variables. The results uncover some interesting predictability patterns that vary along the spectrum. Specifically, by applying the rolling-window analysis, we find mixed results of the causality between the gold and silver markets based on the frequencies of different lengths. Our results provide policy inputs, assist investors and hedgers who wish to invest in these markets by constructing strategies and diversify their portfolios based on different frequencies.This paper assesses the impact of gold and oil price fluctuations on the volatility of the South African stock market and its component indices or sectors - namely, the financial, industrial and resource sectors - to infer the link between the commodity and stock markets in South Africa. Use is made of the vector autoregressive asymmetric dynamic conditional correlation generalised autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (VAR-ADCC-GARCH) model to this end. Moreover, the paper assesses the magnitude of the optimal portfolio weight, hedge ratio and hedge effectiveness for portfolios constituted of a pair of assets, namely oil-stock and gold-stock pairs. The findings of the study show that there is significant volatility spillover between the gold and stock markets, and the oil and stock markets. This finding suggests the importance of the link between the commodity and stock markets, which is essential for portfolio management. With reference to portfolio optimization and the possibility of hedging when using the pairs of assets under study, the findings suggest the importance of combining gold and stocks as the best strategy to hedge against stocks risk, especially during financial crises.The COVID-19 brings back the debate about the impact of disease outbreaks in economies and financial markets. The error correction terms (ECT) and cointegration processing tools have been applied in studies for identifying possible transmission mechanisms between distinct time series. This paper adopts the vector error correction model (VECM) to investigate the dynamic coupling between the pandemics (e.g., the COVID-19, EBOLA, MERS and SARS) and the evolution of key stocks exchange indices (e.g., Dow-Jones, S&P 500, EuroStoxx, DAX, CAC, Nikkei, HSI, Kospi, S&P ASX, Nifty and Ibov). The results show that the shocks caused by the diseases significantly affected the markets. Nonetheless, except for the COVID-19, the stock exchange indices reveal a sustained and fast recovering when an identical length time window of 79 days is analyzed. In addition, our findings contribute to point a higher volatility for all financial indices during the COVID-19, a strong impact over the Ibov-Brazil and its poor recover when compared to the other indices.Using daily data, this paper examines the relationship between the returns of gold and seven sectoral indices in the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) for the period from January 2000 to May 2018. Given the importance of gold in India, there are significant issues in a portfolio selection in that country. By addressing the hedged robust portfolio problems, this paper focuses on three vanilla portfolio problems the maximum return portfolio allocation, the global minimum variance portfolio problem, and the Markowitz portfolio allocation by using various multiple generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) models. The paper finds that gold returns are significantly independent of the returns of the BSE sectoral indices. Besides, gold returns can help predict the future returns of the Consumer Durables and the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods indices as well as the Oil & Gas equity indices. Finally, the findings also show that gold hedges against the information technology stock index and serves as a robust portfolio diversification tool. With these new results, this paper offers several implications for investors and risk management purposes.