Journal of Agricultural Economics and Development
Year:2004 | Volume:11 | Issue:3-4 (43-44)|Papers Count:9

Despite the implementation of five development plans before the revolution and two development plans afterwards, development projects in various economic sectors have not fostered national, regional and local development. The question remains as to why development projects have failed to attain their objectives. Various reasons can be counted for this failure; this article, however, only deals with the causes in a planning context. This article attempts to survey the process of. Planning development projects using three approaches i.e., PPBS, programming, and investigating the nature of regional development, and to review the process of devising and implementing development projects in the areas affected. Finally, it is claimed that development projects do not attain their objectives, because planners do not sufficiently incorporate the necessary knowledge into the process of planning, so the projects are not cost- effective. In this article reference is made to Karkhe dam as a model of such projects.    

This paper tries to make a comparative analysis of human development and food security situation in Islamic countries. By using six different indicators of food security and applying a numerical taxonomy approach and 1999 United Nations' published data, a single measure for ranking the Islamic countries is provided. The findings indicate that there is a positive and significant relation between human development and food security in Islamic countries. Since most of these countries are in medium and low human development ranges, this relationship is even stronger within these ranges. Also the findings indicate that food production per capita index has a stronger effect on food security than any other indicators.    

In the implementation of the 3rd Five year development plan (FYDP), the constitution of agriculture commodity exchange in Iran was approved by the government. The Ministry of Jihad-e Agriculture, in collaboration with Iran Stock Exchange and Agriculture Bank, has taken the first steps to commence the exchange. In this paper, first, the major problem of Iranian agriculture market are reviewed, and then the important concepts of agriculture commodity exchange which can help developing the agriculture standard, marketing function, transparency of the market information, transferring the price risk and also the future and option contracts are explained.    

In this study, the role of government in agricultural sector and in other economy sectors as well has been revaluated. The search for the determination of optimal level of government involvement is of considerable importance in changing public role in serving the agriculture. The aims of this study were: 1) Investigation of relationship between government size and the growth of agricultural sector. 2) Measuring the effects of government investment on the productivity of labor force in agricultural sector. The data on government expenditure, government investment, private investment, labor force and production were gathered from FAO and Iran Economic Information Center, covering the years 1350 to 1379, and were analysed through the models used on Lee and Lin (1994), Guseh (1997) and Nourzad (2000) studies. The results indicate that: Government size has a positive and significant impact on agricultural sector growth. The productivity of labour force in agricultural economic is directly related to the private and government investment.    

Agriculture as the most important economic sector is the first economic sector in the country subject to value added. One of the structural problems of agricultural sector in the Iran's economy is the capital flow from this sector to others, so that the governmental protection policies can not influence this flow. The purpose of this paper is the identification of factors that influence the public and private investment demand in agricultural sector. The cointegration and error correction methods have been used to estimate short and long run relationship between variables. The results show that there is significant relationship between explanatory and dependent variables.    

In this study, we calculate the rate of total factors productivity growth for Iran agriculture sector in the period 1966-96, through the time series data. In this paper first, we estimated agriculture production unction. Then we calculated the rate of total factors productivity. Results show that the rate of total factors productivity growth has a lot of fluctuation in Iran agriculture sector. Also productivity of product factors showed an increasing process in that sector.    

 In this paper the total factor productivity, technical efficiency and technological progress in agriculture important products were measured and analyzed. This study was carried out on 1990 to 1999 data and a non-parametric approach and malmquist index were employed to analyse wheat, barley, cotton, rice and sugar beet data. Results show that a productivity growth exists in irrigated products (except barley). And in total products in which an improved productivity occurs, a technical progress is available. The productivity changes were mainly due to technical efficiency fluctuations in selected products, because the technical efficiency is highly variable; the only exceptions were in barley and sugar beet. In most products, efficiency and technological variability were conversely related, thus it can be suggested that producer's technical efficiency in newer technology is in a less degree than older technology. It is suggested that trustee organizations put more emphasis on technical education along with investment in research, innovation and development of new technology. Based on these results, it is proposed that future studies on productivity measurements accomplish on long run to adjust the short term shocks.    

This study was conducted to investigate the economics of wheat production under salinity and water stress conditions in the north of Gorgan region .The methodology of the research is based on analysis of water salinity production functions. Production functions were estimated using the experimental data obtained from the field experiment including four irrigation water levels( 50,75,100 and 125 percent of crop water requirement) and four irrigation water salinity levels ( 1.6, 7.9, 10.8, and 13.6 dS/m). The experiment was evaluated using a Randomized Complete Block Design with split plot layout that considered water quantity as main plot and water quality. As subplot with three replications. Various types of production functions including Linear, Cobb-Douglas, Quadratic and Transcendental were evaluated, and it was found that transcendental functional form shows the best results. The results revealed that marginal production (productivity) of the quantity of water used is equal to 244 kg or 366000 Rials per hectare. However, economic loss of water salinity is equal to 232 kg or 349000 Rials per hectare. These results indicated that application of saline water for wheat production is possible and can have positive economic impacts.