Journal of Economic Research
Year:2006 | Volume:- | Issue:71|Papers Count:13

This study investigates the effect of economic variables on development of IT in DCs. The results of estimating the econometric model using pooling data method (37 developing countries during 1998-2002) with the assumption of Common Intercept and with Cross Section Weights of data, show that development of IT in developing countries is a function of four demand-side determinants: 1- By increasing per capita GDP, more financial resources are released from essential needs and the possibility of investment in IT infrastructure and the demand for IT goods will be increased. 2- New technologies can be transmitted via channels such as imports and exports. Therefore the greater imports and exports of goods and services in a country (that is, the greater openness to the foreign trade) represent the more diffusion of IT. 3- The expansion of service sector is effective in IT adoption, because Information Technology is most applicable in service sector, especially in an Information-based service sector. 4- Educated people (human capital) are important in at least two ways. First, that educated people have comparative advantage in learning and implementing new technologies and second, that they can raise demand for digital production.    

Water shortage for agricultural crops and other consumptions is an important problem in arid and semi-arid areas. In such places, economic and population growth and the rising standards of life create situations where fresh water is economically scarce, thus posing barriers to investments in developing alternative sources. Water has economic value only when its supply is scarce compared to its demand. Scarce water takes on economic value because many users compete for its use. This paper develops a goal programming model for the determination of optimum cropping pattern and economic value of water in three regions. The objective function of the model is the minimization of deviation from the goals. In this paper we consider five goals and then economic value or shadow price of water will be obtained with sensitivity analysis of constraints. This model has been solved by Undo package under 2002-2003 agricultural data to Shirvan Barzo Dam region in Shirvan which is located in the north of Khorasan province. The results of this paper show that the estimation of the economic value of water ranges between 56 and 2227 and Rials.  

Evaluating the impact of labor market regulations on various labor market variables requires these regulations to be quantified in the form of indices. This paper calculates two main indices: Job Security (JS) and Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) for regular employment. The evolution of JS shows that after some years of relatively low employment protection (1946-1957), JS increases more than three- fold after the introduction of compulsory severance pay for unjustified dismissals in the Third Labor Law (1959). After the approval of the new labor law in 1991, this index increased nearly two- fold compared to the previous law. The quantity of EPL shows that the current Iranian Labor Law is the strictest law about dismissal protection of regular workers among 28 countries in the sample. In this law, the employers' power to dismiss is hardly restricted by procedural requirements, direct dismissal costs (notice and severance pay), prevailing standards and penalties for unfair dismissal.  

To achieve high speed transition to market economy, policy makers in former Soviet Union and East European countries divested state-owned- enterprises to the public. This method, called voucher or mass privatization, was the main method of privatization in these countries. Different studies revealed that reducing ownership concentration through voucher privatization was not promising and deteriorated the enterprise efficiency. In Justice Equity Scheme, Iranian authorities have announced to devolve the ownership of state-owned- enterprises to the public. This paper is an attempt to find the effects of this dispersed ownership. After a brief survey on the experience of privatization in socialist countries, especially Czech Republic, we have calculated the ownership concentration in Tehran Stock Exchange Market to compare the gains under different ownership structures. The results show that minor shareholding and small ownership lead to worsened economic performance of the enterprises.  

In order to respond effectively to his clients, the National Gas Company needs to know about the amount of prevailing demand in every period. From the other hand, lack of information about the amount of subscription demand will in turn cause certain difficulties such as not knowing the number of required contractors, the absence of an appropriate inventory control for all kinds of needed gas consumption counters, etc. In the last few decades, economists and management specialists have frequently used econometric methods for estimating demand. Today, among the available estimation methods, they are using the artificial neural networks methods and fuzzy models in many areas of applications and each of them have its own merits and limitations. A successful combination of these two methods, with emphasis on  learning power of neural networks and logical performance of fuzzy model, have been transformed into a very powerful instrument that are now being applied in different contexts. The main purpose of this article is to estimate the urban household gas subscription demand by using the ARIMA linear method and the fuzzy neural networks nonlinear method and to compare them on the basis of six performance criteria. The article concludes that, considering the six performance criteria, the fuzzy neural networks nonlinear method has supremacy over the ARIMA linear method for estimating the urban household gas subscription demand; therefore, it is more appropriate.  

Macroeconomists have tended to focus on the question whether money (or monetary policy) has any effect on stock market price. This article addresses this question by examining the relationship (predictability) between conditional stock market volatility and conditional money supply volatility in Iran based on monthly data covering the period of April 1991-March 2002. Conditional volatilities are estimated using the Autoregressive Conditional Hetroscedastic (ARCH) and Generalized ARCH (GARCH) models. Relationship (predictability) between the conditional volatility in stock market return and other variables are examined by estimating a two variable Vector Auto Regressive (VAR) model. The variables are including growth of stock market price index (TEPIX) as a measure of return in stock market, growth of money supply (M1), growth of credit supply to the private sector (CPS) and growth of exchange rate in the black market(ER). The results indicate that, stock market is not a transmission channel for monetary policy in Iranian economy.    

Sensitivity in cultural, political, economical and social Inequality led to effort in measuring precision. So, different types of inequality indices are developed and the quality improvement is considered. Due to ever increasing Computer memory capacity and data processing speed, Electronic Cards and transactions, evolution of information and Microdata phenomenon is emerging. Thus, the main purpose of this study has been to apply Microdata Distribution Expenditure (Income), in order to estimate with more precision the Economic Inequality in Iran and to use the opportunity for testing consistency among the different inequality indices in the distribution of income. The results indicate that the average urbanGini coefficient has significantly increased during (2000-2001) in compare with (1996-1999), while there has been no difference in the rural areas. According to the results, one may cautiously state that the beginning of the third 5-years developing plan has started with increase in economic inequality. The down-up inequality trend in urban areas and the up-down trend of inequality in rural areas during 1996 to 1999 indicate the lack of any definite and effective policy concerning the income distribution in Iran.  

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the level and distribution of households' human capital in Iran. Using the combined Dagum approach and the latent variable techniques, the paper estimates the effects of social and economic variables on human capital in Iranian provinces. The empirical results show that the biggest and the smallest significant effects on households' human capital correspond respectively to the households income and marital status. The paper also shows that the 37 and 41 year-old individuals have the highest level of human capital in Iran.  

This paper is to theoretically review the concept of social capital and six ways that this concept can affect economics. Social capital is a concept that states the quantity and quality of relations between members of a society. The more the social capital, the less the transaction cost, and the more opportunities available for mutually beneficial collective actions which means we may face fewer problems that result to market failure. The experimental literature of social capital has shown the importance of this concept in many economies. Most studies have shown the important role of social capital in some fields such as creation of human capital, efficiency of government, having more innovations, flow of information and achieving more economic growth.  

Using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), this paper examines relative performance of electricity distribution companies in Iran. Technical efficiency (overall and pure) and scale efficiency are calculated for 42 Iranian electricity distribution companies in 1381. In addition, total factor productivity growth based on Malmquist Productivity Index, is calculated for the companies during 1377-1380. The results indicate that inactivity at optimum scale is the most important factor of inefficiency and labor acquirements have no effect on companies efficiency. In addition, most of companies are operating at increasing returns to scale area. Based on Malmquist Productivity Index, estimation of total factor productivity growth is negative during 1377-1380 which can be related to using old equipments in electricity distribution networks by the companies.  

Dynamism, variations in time, is the inherent characteristic of most economical phenomena. In econometrics, ignoring this dynamism may cause many problems due to over simplification of the problems. One such case occurs in application of static regression models to problems with dynamic nature. In so doing, one ignores the fact that the parameters of the model change in time, which may lead to misleading results. In this paper, we intend to exhibit the importance of this negligence in the context of a practical problem, namely modeling the weekly average rate of conversion of us dollar into Iranian currency, Rial. Thus, two approaches of static and dynamic modeling are compared with respect to their efficiency in tracking the path of the variations of the US dollar rate according to various criteria such as MAD and MSE of predictions. Using a dynamic time series model along with required interventions at outlier points superiority of the Bayesian dynamic model is shown.  

Searching for policies to cut the current account deficit on one hand and improving the foreign balance of payments on the other, is one of the major tasks of every country's financial authorities. However, the interrelationships of trade, financial and exchange rate policies have made research in such fields cumbersome. Therefore, the knowledge of such bilateral relations paves the way for setting up macroeconomic policies in obtaining a well behaved foreign trade sector. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the short run and the long run relationships of the factors affecting trade deficits during the period 1338-1380. The results indicate that there exists a long run interactive relation between the real budget deficit and the current account deficit. Secondly, implementing the devaluation of the home currency has not been a useful policy to. cut the current account deficit. Also the terms of trade deterioration, i. e., a decrease in the ratio of the index of the export prices to import prices, has increased exports and improved the current account trade balance and in case of the presence of trade deficit, has lowered it.