IRANIAN JOURNAL OF APPLIED ECONOMICS
Year:2017 | Volume:7 | Issue:20 |Papers Count:6

Energy and energy efficiency is quickly becoming a topic of considerable interest all over the world. Competing demands for energy use and the need for smaller energy footprints require leaders across a wide range of industries to improve their understanding of the complex issues surrounding energy management. The budget's dependency on exogenous revenues (oil and gas wind fall gains), lack of technical and economic productivity in energy consumption and their environmental impacts cause us to pay more attention to energy consumption as a whole. This paper uses the structural decomposition analysis (SDA) method to study Iran's energy consumption (Primary and secondary energy) over the period 2002 to 2012. Also, it identifies the effective factors in energy consumption by decomposing energy consumption into three determinants including structural effect, productive effect and energy intensity. Results demonstrate that 73% of increment energy consumption is due to the effect of final demand, and the effect of energy intensity has contributed 14% to this increment. But the effects of production structure and of consumption structure have reduced 7.7% and 4.9% of the total effect.

Globalization is the process of intermingling and integrating national economies with the global economy, which has been advised by policy -makers and planners in recent decades. This study investigates the trade openness effect on economic growth in 14 selected Middle Eastern countries over the period 1990 to 2012. For this purpose, Generalized Method of Moments (GMM), Full Modified- Ordinary Least Square (FMOLS) and Dynamic Ordinary Least Square (DOLS) are used. The results demonstrate that there is a significant positive relationship between trade openness and economic growth; so that trade openness has had a positive impact on the selected countries' economic growth, and trade restrictions slow down the economic growth.According to the obtained results, investment, active population and human capital, each has a positive and significant effect on the growth (dependent variable). In other words, the role of education in improving labor productivity and its impact on economic growth based on the research results are undeniable. The results of the estimation of FMOLS and DOLS methods also confirmed the results of GMM method. The only difference between the three mentioned methods is the intensity influence of the explanatory variable on dependent variable. Hence, it is recommended that policy- makers provide the necessary grounds for expanding economic cooperation, and as well asimproving the processes and simplification the export and import laws (trade policies), provide the possibility of exchanges trade development.

Employment and availability of desired opportunities are one of the basic needs of every society. In order to examine the impact of oil price shocks on employment in the selected oil-exporting countries, annual data for the period 2000-2014 and the econometric models of Christiano- Fitzgerald Filter have been used to calculate the shocks, and the panel data model is used to estimate the model and data analysis. The results of this study have shown that in the exporting countries, employment is directly influenced by oil price shocks. Hence, in these countries as oil prices increase, oil revenue rises and employment increases consequently, and vice versa. Therefor these countries should utilize the opportunity of higher oil prices for economic prosperity and increased employment. Since in these countries lower oil prices lead to a decrease in employment, necessary measures must be taken to deal with the negative effects of lower oil prices on employment.

This article takes a new approach to examining government expenditure effects on economic growth, in countries with high and average income, by applying the Panel Vector Auto Regressive (PVAR) model to data from World Development Indicator between 2000 and 2013. For this purpose, the kind of government expenditures are classified and their reactions are considered. The main specification of the VAR model using panel data is the existence of the simultaneously and continuous shocks in the model that can be studied a large group of countries with different characteristics. The results show that according to the expectations, the sudden increment in consuming government expenditure has no significant effect on the economic growths of the all groups of countries; and the infrastructure government expenditure, such as education and health, only have a positive effect on the countries' economic growths. In other word, the lack of continuity of government management and strategic policies and its replacement with the expenditure which is as like as a shock has not had a visible effect on economic growth.

One of the item that has the highest share in household expenditure, is housing spending. In recent years, the house price increasing has caused many poor households not to able to have this important commodity. The current study examines the relationship between income inequality and housing access for low-income households in urban areas of different provinces using the micro -data of Households’ Income and Expenditures surveys over the period 2008 to 2014. Result demonstrate that increase income inequality leads to decrease residual income, to increase household's rent to income ratio and to decrease using of housing; while the mentioned relation is reversed for high- income household. But, increase of variety of housing causes to decrease the effect of income inequality on housing access. Therefore, proportional distribution of economic activity regarding to comparative advantage in different provinces and providing the necessary infrastructure can be considered as an important policy to increase the access for low-income households.

The present research using "descriptive- analytic" method trine to use shift- share model to study the mayor situations in economic activities in Semnan province from employment point of view during 3 decades (74-94). The results show that mine section in these periods by having location coefficient of above one, has been the base section is part of the province in terms of employment. Based on Shift- share model, changes in the mining sector in terms of employment in the country during the period 1374 to 1394 has been upward, while the performance of the sector has been declining in Semnan province, the model suggests that, industry, agriculture and the sector of electricity, gas and water in the province of the country has competitive advantage.