Journal of Economic Research
Year:2008 | Volume:43 | Issue:83|Papers Count:11

In this study, we assess the impact of oil price changes on the macroeconomic variables of some oil importers in OECD countries, including USA, Italian, France and Japan during the period 1960-2002. The results for different countries imply asymmetric impact of oil price changes on GDP growth rates; moreover, the results show that monetary shocks are an important and noticeable factor explaining the fluctuations of GDP growth rates, supplementing the impact of oil price shocks.

In this study market orientation of Iran commercial banks has been considered as an effective factor on banks' performance and the relationship between them has been surveyed. Accordingly a conceptual model has been developed that shows both direct and indirect (through value creation) relationship.The developed conceptual model has been evaluated by bank and marketing experts in the frame of a questionnaire. Then the model has been corrected as a final model based on their comments. The population of surveyed experts was 50. The questionnaire contained 2 main questions (1 open and the other closed). In order to analyze the data gathered from open questions, the content analysis method was applied. Binomial and Friedman Ranking tests were used for analyzing the data gathered from closed question.Results show that based on experts' idea the totality of the model and the relationship between the model's factors is confirmed with some corrections. And also it is concluded that all factors and their elements are considered important but the degree of importance of elements are not equal.

The main aim goal of this paper is estimating time series of Social Capital in Iran. For this aim, first we have reviewed theoretical and empirical literature of social capital, and then we used Fuzzy Method for estimating time series of social capital. We used latent variable, because social capital is a qualify variable. Crime and participation indexes are two related variables with social capital. The first one has negative effect on social capital and the second one has positive effect. The results show that trend of social capital in half of last century has slight downward slop. Also, it has many fluctuations because of many events in Iranian history in the last century.

Spatial planning is one of the powerful means for the reduction of transaction costs in the transportation sector.Using this approach one can design and determine optimum of  urban land use as well as cut down the traveling demand to different places and thereby achieve the reduction of transactions cost.In this paper, though implicitly, we have tried to present and demonstrate a method for reducing demands through site selection land use and economic impact analysis.The results of this study have been applied to a fruit and produce market in the district five of Tehran municipality. Finally the costs of the reduction of transactions arising from traveling demand have been calculated.

The objective of this study is to estimate the demand for money in Iran using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration analysis. The empirical results show that there is a unique cointegrated and stable long-run relationship among M1 monetary aggregate, income, inflation and exchange rate. We find that the income elasticity and exchange rate coefficients are positive while the inflation elasticity is negative. This indicates that depreciation of domestic currency increases the demand for money, supporting the wealth effect argument and people prefer to substitute physical assets for money balances that are supporting our theoretical expectation. Our results also after incorporating the CUSUM and CUSUMSQ tests reveal that the M1 money demand function is stable between 1985 and 2006.

Natural disasters as unanticipated events are negative shocks to aggregate supply. The response of an economy to these shocks depends on various factors including implementation the engineering codes in building, existence of sufficient stocks of farm products and cash assets, public training and management method of natural crises. In this paper, it is tried to study the importance and impact of occurred natural disasters on aggregate level of economic activities. To do this, the Auto-Regressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) has been used over the 1959-2004 period. The estimation results of short- and long-run models indicate the negative impact of natural disasters on Iranian economy and a U-shaped relationship between natural disaster damages and non-oil GDP. Also the estimation of Error Correction Model (ECM) implies that only 17 percent of disequilibria are adjusted in each period.

This paper concentrates on investigating the effect of monetary instruments on macroeconomic variables using structural model over the period 1981- 2006. The main results of simulation show that decrease in the interest rate, increases investment but its effect on production (GDP) is negligible. This weak effect is probably due to some factors such as, the introduction of some new projects with low returns, allocation of some public resources towards the policy implementation and its subsequent inflationary impacts. In addition, the results show that simultaneous decrease in the loan interest rate and public investment could offset the effectiveness of the interest rate policy and decrease public investment and GDP. Also, the results show that there is a direct relationship between public and private investment.

This paper aims at comparing tax effort in Iran with that of 14 developing countries including Jordan, Algeria, Malaysia, Congo, Nicaragua, India, Sri Lanka, Paraguay, Tunisia, Peru, Venezuela, Philippine, and South Africa. A tax ratio model is developed for this purpose. Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) method and panel data for 1994-2002 periods are utilized to estimate the model. The results indicate that the tax ratio is positively affected by the shares of industry, service and foreign sector value added in GDP. However, we found that the ratio of foreign debt to GDP, the share of agricultural value added in GDP and inflation rate have negative impacts on the tax ratio.Estimated tax shares are then used to calculate tax effort for the sample of countries under investigation. The results indicate that Iran has the least tax effort as compared with other countries under investigation. This implies that there is substantial room for improvement in tax effort in this country.

Considering the role of health in human life, economic growth and social development, we can express that; human source is both means and aim of economic growth.In prior studies about human capital and economic growth, the main emphasis was on educational capital and the role of health capital was not considered seriously. The present study tries to investigate the relationship between health and economic indicators like Gross Domestic Product (GDP). For this purpose, we used government health care expenditure as an index of labor health in neo-classical growth model, and then we quantified this relationship.The results show the significant and positive effect of government health expenditure on economic growth for the period of 1338-1383.

What are the main success factors of microfinance institutions in providing financial services to poor people in a sustainable manner? In this article we try to answer this question. In one hand, we analyze the core compatibility between microeconomics of asymmetric information, transaction cost and risk, and new different operational mechanisms applied by microfinance institutions. On the other hand, we investigate key success factors by performance indices of microfinance institutions around the world. These analyses indicate that, with high emphasizing on financial sustainability, without government direct involvement and with using innovative operational mechanisms, such as group lending, applied by leading microfinance institutions, we can develop this industry. The results have important policy implications when microfinance is being accepted as a solution for creating sustainable access to financial services for poor and low-income people.