Journal of Economic Research
Year:2007 | Volume:- | Issue:78|Papers Count:8

In the last few decades, world financial markets have faced numerous volatilities and fluctuations. As a result active economic agents have become more interested in how to understand and foresee this fluctuation. Forecasting developments of the oil market has become ever more important after the oil crisis of the 1970s. The objective was to reduce the potential risk of such fluctuations by having advance knowledge of expected changes. Review of time series data of the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) prices indicate the presence of clustering volatility, can not be ignored in furcating. This has led us to focus in this study on the forecasting volatility of crud oil prices. We have used ARCH models to evaluate statistical errors of forecasts. The study results indicate continuous effect of shocks on conditional variance of crude oil prices. Future volatility of crude oil prices is dependent on oil price changes in the past. GARCH and TGARCH models perform better than other models of conditional variance in forecasting volatility of crude oil prices.

Social capital has increasingly attracted the interests of the economists and there have been many studies on this subject and its influence on economic performance. The concept of social capital consists of elements such as network, norms and trust the present study has examined the effect of trust, as one of the most important aspects of social capital, on the economic growth of Iran's provinces.In this paper, we review the definitions and concepts of trust. Then we review channels through which trust affects the economic growth. In the context of generalized neoclassical growth models, we introduce a model of the effect of trust on economic growth. In empirical examination we use the data on surveys of "Iranian's Values and Judgments"," Iranian's Cultural Behaviors", the data of Statistic Center of Iran and the Central Bank. On the basis of models of economic growth, we examine the effect of trust on the economic growth of Iran's provinces during the time period 2000-2003 (1379-82).The empirical findings indicate that trust has a positive effect on the economic growth.

The Advantages of industrial agglomeration that initially limited to economies of scale, have gradually improved to cover support services, competitiveness and efforts of firms in some industrial cluster for cooperation. On the other hand, industrial agglomeration balances regional distribution of employment and production. This paper examines these benefits and analyses the important of industrial agglomeration in development planning and creating consistency for industries, with in the context of the golobal competition.

In this article, by looking at the statistical data of 24 countries Middle East and Asia, being the members of union International des Chemins Defer (VIC) and Organization fur Cooperation of Railways for a period of 5 years from 2000 Up to 2004, the efficiency and productivity of the railways of those countries, have been examined by using Malemquist Index based on the Technique of Data Development Analysis. The line of distinction between this article and the former ones is exactly the usage of the above index which can be used fur measuring changes in efficiency, that is, efficiency under conditions of constant and changeable returns to scale. The average technical efficiency of the Iranian Railways system under CCR condition is equal to 0.590 and BCC condition equals 0.6. Furthermore, in all approaches fur ranking Iranian railways, there has been no better ranking than" eleven" in terms of efficiency which belongs to the " Iranian Railways System".

According to public economics theories, decentralization leads to more efficiency of public sector policies. Decentralization policies have some benefits and costs which are different in various countries according to their structures and the level of decentralization. This article focuses on increasing public sector efficiency as one of the benefits of decentralization policies. There fore, the article uses a new approach based on conventional tools in microeconomics as well as maximum of median consumer's utility to study the effects of decentralization on economic efficiency. The findings of analytical study show that the devolution of authorities to local government may lead to increasing of economic efficiency.

This paper intends to improve our understanding of productivity growth performance in Iranian economy during the past three decades. This carried out by focusing on the role of resource reallocations between sectors and its contribution to aggregate productivity growth by using DEA approach.DEA lends itself naturally to economic sectors performance because of its employment for assessing relative performance of sectors using various inputs to produce outputs. DEA is an ideal method to measure efficiency relative to the best performing sector. This allows us to identify efficient and non-efficient sectors and driving factors determining the efficiency of sectors. To do so, DEA calculates an efficiency score for each sector and generates a best practices frontier. To get this, in this study, TFP analysis is done by using value added data for each sector in Iranian economy. By analyzing data we find that TFP changes for all economic sectors has been roughly increased during the period of study but the service sector situation is unsatisfactory. However, because of the role of service sector in economic growth and development process more attention is needed.Furthermore, the potential for improvements in productivity growth in service sector through increased use of ICT is still possible.

Total Factor Productivity (TFP) as an index for calculating productivity level in an organization, describes the conversion procedure of total expenditure into total income. Therefore TFP growth will results improvements in market competition, production and services quality and performance, progress in planned targets, expenses reduction, incomes expansion and etc.In order to evolve from an input oriented to productivity oriented economy, administrations are bound to declare the portion of productivity growth in their respective production growth in the Fourth Development planning. Such that at the end of the Fourth planning the TFP portion in GDP growth has to reach, 31.3%. Although an average growth of 3.5% in labor, 1% in Capital and 2.5% in Total Factor have to be achieved annually during the Fourth planning. However, recognizing the sources of productivity growth fur planning and deriving solutions is of great importance. In addition to TFP growth calculation, using a combination of non-parametric Data envelopment Analysis (DEA) method and Tornquist productivity growth index provide a decomposition of efficiency and technological changes quota in the respective TFP growth for one Decision Making Unit (DMU) in adjacent time periods. To examine the proposed method more accurately, in this study the TFP growth and effective factors through years (1347-1383) in Iran's electric Power industry has been analyzed.

Strategic trade policy focuses primarily on trade policy in the presence of oligopoly. this policy is defined as trade policy that alters a strategic relationship between firms. This definition implies that the existence of a strategic relationship between firms is a necessary precondition for the application of strategic trade policy.In this term domestic government may undertake some trade policy intervention. If it intervenes, it changes the payoffs to the firms arising from the various possible combinations of actions by the firms. Introducing or increasing an export subsidy to the domestic firms causes the output and profit of the domestic firm to rise and output and profit of the foreign firms to fall.In this paper, I show some interesting results as follows: First, It is shown that when the governments decided to subsidize firms in the cournot 'competition, it increases both firms' output and export. Second, in the cournot competition, when each firm has identical cost, the welfare sunder the bilateral intervention is smaller than under no intervention. Third, in the cournot competition. When each firm has identical cost, the weU3reunder the unilateral intervention is bigger than under no intervention. Forth, if the rival government chooses intervention policy, national government has to intervene to prevent a decrease in export and the market share of internal firms.