Journal of Agricultural Economics and Development
Year:2011 | Volume:18 | Issue:4 (72)|Papers Count:7

Undesired consequences of subsidizing the inputs resulted in emphasis on elimination of the input subsidies in order to get the rapid economic growth in developing countries. Chemical fertilizers are of the important inputs receiving subsidy in Iranian agriculture sector. Regarding the extent of the chemical fertilizer subsidy, elimination of the subsidy may lead to cinsiderable welfare impacts. Therefore, this study conducted while it aims at exmination of the welfare consequences resulted from reduction or elimination of chemical fertilizer subsidy in production of strategic crops of wheat and rice. The study period covers 1974-2006. The intrest groups of our analysis are production factor suppliers, production factors consumers or producers of the selected crops as well as government. To get the objective a simulation system was established, containg the crops and production factor markets and then the impact of the subsidy reduction was traced wihin the framework of the model. This system comprise the demand and supply of the production factors and production of the selected crops.The findings showed that labor and capital are used in production of wheat and rice as substitutes. Impact of the capital price on capital demand as well as the impact of the crops price on the capital and labor demand were found insignificant. The findings of the production function also revealed that labor has no significant effect on the wheat and rice production while capital affects their production significantly. The results also showed that producers of the crops experience a reduction in their welfare as the chemical fertilizer subsdiy reduces while the production factors suppliers benefit from that. However, the interest groups as a whole benefit from reduction and elimination of chemical fertilzer subsidy, amounting to 3927.6 and 404.4 billion Rials for wheat and rice under subsidy elimination scenario, respectively.

In this study, the citrus marketing problems in Dezful are reviewed and the citrus wholesale and retail sale marketing margins are determined. Also, based on mark-up model, factors affecting marketing margins were determined. Data were collected using questionnaire and face to face survey and random two-stage cluster sampling method of 36 citrus producers in Dezful and 15 wholesaler, retailer 12 and 10 consumers in 2008.Results show that in Dezful different marketing operations such as grading, packaging and transportation are done manually and is traditional. The results also show that the amount of net profit of wholesale and retail manufacturers much more than the net profit is.The results of marketing margins function estimation based on markups also show that marketing margins related to marketing costs reversely and directly to the retail price.

Fars province has water resources and potential of trout production among other provinces in Iran. In this study, the operation of individual units of trout cultivators in Fars province in 2001-2004 is investigated by using data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach and Analysis of Malmquist index. The data for mentioned years are collected from fishery office of Fars province. The results show that technical efficiency of the production units is good and highly homogenous. All the units show no negative return to scale of production that is a sign of the ability of production’s level expansion to achieve more profit. Analysis of Malmquist index shows that during the period under study, the average TFP growth is 2.8 percent annually (8.3 percent totally) and the major contribution of the TFP growth is related to technological changes (75 percent of total change in TFP).

73 percent of Iran's surface is covered by arid and semi arid lands. Sever lack of water and non distribution of raining in time and place and the low water productivity in the agricultural sector and increased of demand for agricultural products, several drought an advanced water one of the most important and rare entry in agricultural production. Therefore, the right managing of water demand and all efforts for the welfare of water consumption may increase the rate of water and reduce the growing problem of misuse of water. One style of management of water demand is the economic valuation of water that may increase the economic role of water in development. The study was conducted by product approach to the evaluation function of the economic value of water for application for entry in the Alborz farms in the county of the province of Qazvin. Data collection is done in 2006-2007. The results show that the value of water in the production of maize in the study time is 847 Rial for each M3 of water that has the best difference in water prices that farmers pay for it (48 Rial).

In this paper, for investigating the impact of different type of technology on agronomy and horticultural employment during 1961-2006, Auto Regressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) model and Error Correction Model (ECM) have been used. Results show that technology indicators like, chemical fertilizer consumption and mechanization index in the long run have positive and significant impact on agronomy and horticultural employment. But tractorization has only short run impact on agronomy and horticulture employment.

Forecasting macro-economic variables is an important concern to programmers, policy makers and economic enterprise. This is why different models which have been created are competing with each other to best realize future projection.Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is particularly out of many methods which used widespread recently. We have done so in this study to estimate Iran’s agricultural commodities export model for the period of 2008-2013 by applying econometrics and ANN modeling. To this end, we have used 1965-2001 time series in order to prediction and training the network, and at same time we have used 2002-2007data to verity accuracy of the results. The results showed that the pioneer ANN has less error and much better performance to estimate volume of Iran agricultural export comparing to VAR method of econometrics.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of the performance of Agri-Bank and Agri-Jihad organization on amount success of entrepreneur small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in agricultural sector in 2007. Whole population was that were 356 persons of establishment’s SMEs in Markazi province (Farmahin County). According to Cochran formula, and by using stratified proportional random sampling, 100 persons were selected for study.The findings indicated that factor’s ability of competition with other SMEs, products quality and ability of comparison with unforeseen events are three influence priorities in success of SMEs, and great severity of the banks in paying facilities (loans), untimely payment credits and bureaucracy problems of banks are the most important problems for establishment of SMEs. Also observed positive and meaning relation between amount successes in SMEs efficiency with Agri-Jihad organization; but not meaning relation between Agri-Bank performance and success of SMEs.