JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH
Year:2013 | Volume:3 | Issue:12|Papers Count:8

This paper wants to study the relationship between social trust and human capital. Social trust is a necessary condition for human development. Fuzzy method is used. Findings of this study showed that in %68 of the countries, social capital is a necessary condition for human development and coverage index showes that %63 of human capital space is covering by social trust. It also was cleared that the degree of membership in social trust set is associated with a degree of membership in a set of human capital; so, the more the degree of membership in the set of countries with high social trust, the more degree of membership in the set of countries with high human capital.

This paper investigates the threshold effects of financial development on economic growth in D-8 countries for the period of 1980 to 2011, using Panel Smooth Transition Regression (PSTR) model as one of the most prominent regime-switching models. For this end, domestic credit to private sector as percent of GDP is used as a financial development indicator and transition variable. The linearity test results indicate strongly nonlinear relationship among variables under consideration. Moreover, considering one transition function and one threshold parameter, as a two regime model, is sufficient to specification of nonlinear relationship among variables. The results indicate that threshold value is 26.55 percent and the estimated slope parameter is 0.24. In the first regime, financial development has a negative impact on economic  growth. Beyond threshold value, in the second regime, the impact of financial development is positive and very low. Therefore, financial development has not played an important role in the process of economic growth in D-8 countries, and its influence is even very low with advancement of financial development.

In this paper we design an index for measuring regional discrimination and estimating regional economic discriminations effect on states’ economic growth in Iran. We use panel data econometric method for the years 2000-2010. The conclusions indicate that positive discriminations for states that have high potential has negative effects on growth and production. But positive discriminations for states that have high needs has positive effects on growth and production.

Environmental damage caused by economic activities is known as one of the most important side that affecting social welfare adversely. Pollution emissions related with more economic activities reduce positive impact of economic growth on social welfare. Hence concern of policy makers is to formulate and implement the economic planning in order to control environmental damage caused by expanding of economic activities. One of these control instruments is to levy a pollution tax. Therefore in this paper we are tried to calculate the optimal level of pollution tax for Iranian economy using an augmented growth model. To this end, we intended a tripartite model consists of households, firms and government. After solving the model, we estimated optimal pollution tax using data of Iranian economy. Calibrating the solved model, the optimal pollution tax is estimated about 7.8 thousand Rials per ton of CO2 emissions.

The internal saving in a country, is the most important source for financing and economic growth. These savings are confronted with risk of a volatile rate of return to capital. The uncertainty in the rate of return on capital may lead to distorted economic decisions by the savers, consumers and investors. Depending on the pattern of these behaviors we may observe deviations in the rate of economic growth. This study attempts to estimate the rate of economic growth with uncertainty in the rate of return on capital using standard Brownian motion and the optimized random control to compare it with the planned rate of economic growth. The findings indicate that; if the risk-aversion coefficient is less than one, the average long-term rate of economic growth will be less than the planned growth rate. Further, using the data on Iranian economy for the period 1974-2011, first, a dynamic model, based on SDE, was simulated for GDP by rate of growth %3.85, then, the relationship between capital return volatility (using the EGARCH model) and the rate of economic growth was analyzed. The results are indicative of a negative relationship between growth rate and the fluctuations in the rate of return on capital.

In recent decades, the issues related to human capital and its impact on economic growth have been important. In this regard, the main objective of this study is to evaluate the impact of human development on economic growth in the period of 1971-2012 in Iran. Therefore, according to the purpose of this research, firstly we calculated Iran’s human development index based on the UN definition and analyzed the impact of human development index on economic growth by using Markov-Switching model. The main model of this study is determined by using the model of Lucas and Line (2004). To estimate the nonlinear relationship between human development and economic growth based on the likelihood function, MSI model with two regimes (prosperity or recession) was chosen from the different states of the Markov-Switching (MS) model. Changing the relationship between these two variables over time, is one of the most important characteristics of Markov-Switching method. Based on the results, human development has a positive impact in recession periods and negative impact in prosperity on economic growth in Iran. Also, stability of the first regime (recession) is greater than the second (prosperity).

Growth of financial economics literature in recent decades has clearly shown that financial development facilitates economic growth. Important question is that why some countries have more developed financial sectors than others. In this study, effect of government size and good governance on financial development was considered by using statistical data, including 76 developing and developed countries in time period of 1996 to 2011. The relationship between the variables was estimated with Generalized Moment Method (GMM). The results showed that government size and good governance has negative and positive effects on financial sector development, respectively. Also, for the purpose of adapting and improving of the results, effect of government size and good governance on financial sector development was separately examined in developing and developed countries, which supported the previous results. The results confirmed the political view and the analysis of results also demonstrated that inflation has the highest influence on financial sector development in developing countries.