AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS: IRANIAN JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS (ECONOMICS AND AGRICULTURE JOURNAL)
Year:2018 | Volume:12 | Issue:3 |Papers Count:7

Drought is one of the major threats among natural hazards to people’ s livelihoods and socio-economic development. In other words, drought events and their consequences pose a considerable problem for governments, business and individuals. Some regions such as Fars province are more prone to drought disasters and each region differs in its capacity to effectively prepare for and respond to the effects of drought. Therefore, the number of people affected by drought and the types of impacts experienced will be different by region. The risk associated with drought for any region is a product of the exposure to the natural hazard and the vulnerability of the society to the event. Consequently, planners and policy makers in drought prone region should conduct risk assessment. Therefore, the aim of this study is to measure ex-ante and ex-post drought vulnerability of farmers in Bakhtegan basin. A sample of 276 farmers was selected for interview and collection of necessary farm level data for two years. The results also indicated that if crops are the sole income source and have no consumption smoothing capability at all, over 37% of sampled farmers are vulnerable to drought. But 28. 62% of sampled farmers would be vulnerable if they can rely on both crops and off-farm income. Therefore, it can be concluded that the inclusion of off-farm earnings in the income measure, reduces the number of vulnerable households. It is important to recognize that based on the results obtained from econometric method, there are four groups of farmers: 1) ex-ante vulnerable and ex-post vulnerable, 2) ex-ante resilient and ex-post vulnerable, 3) ex-ante vulnerable and ex-post resilient, 4) ex-ante resilient and ex-post resilient. The findings of this study can help policy makers to lessen farmers’ vulnerability to drought by promoting planning and the adoption of appropriate risk management strategies.

The use of new financial instruments, and specifically option contracts, as a tool for risk management and Create Profitability, can help to boom exchanges and reduce the problems of the agricultural sector. Despite price fluctuations of agricultural products, it can be said from a variety of options contracts, an Asian Option can play a more effective part in reducing the risk of these contracts. According to this issue, the aim of this study is to determine the price of Asian Option contract for soybean meal. Monte Carlo simulation method was used to determine the price of Option. Required information includes historical data on the weekly price of soybean meal in the years 2013-16. The results show that this option rather than a simple European Option (Black-Scholes model) is cheaper. In addition to the standard Monte Carlo method, the control variates and antithetic variates methods were used to reduce the variance simulation. The results indicate that the control variates in variance reduction Monte Carlo simulation method has a very good performance and significantly reduce the variance.

Apple is considered one of the most important Iranian products, which has a high position in both job and value creation. In this study, empirical analysis of major Iranian apple export markets was conducted using the pricing to market (PTM) under two kind of exchange rate such as nominal exchange rate and real exchange rate. In this regard, the annual data from 1993 to 2015 were used. The econometric analysis using the panel corrected standard errors (PCSE) showed that PTM behavior is influenced by the exchange rate effects and The impact of country specific effects on the behavior of Apple exporters is not observed. The PTM behavior was better predicted with the real exchange rate. The analysis of the asymmetric effects of the exchange rate also showed that these effects are asymmetric in exports to the Netherlands. Given the negative sign of the coefficient of estimating the asymmetric effects model, it can be concluded that the effect of the depreciation of the rial on the transfer of exchange rate fluctuations to the Dutch apples markets is greater than its increase. Therefore, it is suggested that economic experts identify different market elasticity marks, to determine the type of market. In countries where the market is a competitive and elastic product, it is necessary to identify the behavior of other competitors and reduce export prices to compete with other countries where export Apple.

In this study, in order to save and improve agricultural water consumption in Neka county, the farmers' response to the policy of price change and the amount of available water in agriculture was studied. In this regard, the Positive Mathematical Programming (PMP) method was used to simulate the farmers' responses in Neka county. Data gathering was done by Simple random sampling method during the 2011-2012 crop year. The scenarios included increase in water prices per cubic meter of 4, 6 and 8 times, and 20, 30 and 50 percent reduction in the amount of available water and as a complementary policy, increase of 4, 6 and 8 times the price of water, with decrease of 50, 30, 20% of available water which was considered. The results showed that with the policy of raising the price of water up to 4 times and the policy of reducing the amount of water up to 20%, there is not Considerable change compared to the primary data. with regard to the policy of rising water prices, the shift in the pattern of cropping of irrigated products into rainfed products and the level of crops are allocated to products that require a lower water requirement and higher production value. In fact, this policy doesn’ t reduce water consumption significantly. Also, in the policy of reducing the amount of available water, There have been no changes from cropping pattern of irrigated crops to rainfed crops, but Water consumption decrease significantly. In conclusion, water demand is elastic to its price.

In order to compare the effect of water pricing policy with increasing irrigation efficiency and investment in water and sewage technology, on reducing the deficit of groundwater reservoirs "DGR", production, net imports, net social benefits and income of farmers in Khorasan Razavi province, Five cities including Mashhad, Sabzevar, Neyshabour, Torbat Jam and Torbat Heydarieh were selected and the impact of these policies was studied using a positive mathematical programming model (PMP_GME). The analysis of the effect of rising water prices showed that although this policy has different results in different regions, making it impossible to implement, farmers' income is reduced from 19 to 98 and an average of 63 percent and increases social costs by 50 percent. So that the cost per cubic meter of saved water will be 5750 Rials. By increasing the efficiency of water transmission and distribution and without increasing the area under cultivation, the DGR is reduced by an average of 83%. The farmer's cost will be 300 Rials and the social costs will be 700 Rials per cubic meter. If the total irrigation efficiency is corrected to its potential, the DGR is reduced by 106%. If the increase in efficiency is accompanied by lack of control over the level of crops, although the production increases, but in conditions, the DGR are rising, but on average they fall by 53%. Replacing new systems instead of old and increasing the irrigation efficiency until to potential level without increasing the level of cultivation, reduces the DGR by 94%. But without increasing water application efficiency, only 63% of the DGE is corrected. It is therefore suggested, in place that the efficiency of transmission and distribution of water has increased, government reduce the extraction of ground water, proportional of increase in irrigation efficiency. Also, in critical areas, providing facilities for new irrigation systems be conditional on reducing water harvesting.

Intra industry trade compared to inter-industry trade imposes a lower cost on economic, so identifying the effective factors is important. Since Iran’ s Agricultural sector has high potential in production and trade, the aim of this paper is identifying the determinants on agricultural intra industry trade between Iran and Asian partners as well as assessing the factors in ECO (including Iran) and ASEAN (without Iran) trade agreements over the period of 2001-2014. For these purposes, a gravity model is used. The results indicated that difference in per capita GDP (income), the difference in agricultural land, and RTA have positive and significant, while distance and border have a negative and significant effect on agricultural intra industry trade between Iran and Asian partners. Based on the results, difference in per capita GDP (income), economic difference and common border are the factors reducing intra industry trade of Iran with ECO, while differences in per capita GDP (income) and difference in agricultural land have an increasing impact on intra industry trade in the agricultural sector of Iran with ASEAN countries. So, it is suggested that appropriate policies such as membership in larger trade agreement implement in order to strengthen Iran’ s agricultural intra industry trade.