Journal of Economic Studies and Policies
Year:2012 | Volume:7 (17) | Issue:2 (87)|Papers Count:8

The main objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of currency devaluation on the trade balance of Iran by using J and S curve approaches over the period of 1976-2007.For this purpose, we used the Johansen’s co-integration approach and impulse response function for the long run and short run analysis, respectively.The empirical results reveal that currency devaluation has a negative effect on the Iranian trade balance in long run as well as short run and reject the J and S curves hypothesis for Iran. Overall the empirical findings of the J and S suggest that the trade balance of Iran does not improve as a result of currency devaluation.

Agricultural economists have indicated that the rate of return of expenditures on agricultural R&D is relatively favourable.Alston and Evenson (2007) say that the R&D expenditure is the core variable for the productivity factor. In this study, at first the impact of international agricultural research and human capital was estimated on productivity by Almon lag model and in the next step the rate of return international agricultural R&D on the agricultural sector of Iran was calculated. The result showed that the international R&D in agricultural sector effects on productivity after 4 years and this effect will last for 3 years. The long term coefficient of international agricultural R&D is 0.18 and the internal rate of return (IRR) was calculated up to 38% in productivity models of Iran during the period of 1979- 2008 (1358-1387) which is lower than the average rate in developing countries.

This study deals with Iranian business cycles and analysis of their causes. In this study the time series of variables consisting national income and the other influential variables in creating business cycles have been used and all the data with annual frequency are considered as logarithmic and the fixed price of 1997. The period of study is between 1971 and 2007. In other to extract the business cycles, the statistic at method of Hodrick-Prescott Filter (HP) was used and the Business Cycles Indicators of lag. Lead and coincident variables were recognized. After wards, the lead variable were analyzed based on linear regression model of business cycles and also on the advanced econometric method called Generalized Method of Moment (GMM), and the contribution of each above variables were determined in creating fluctuations of real gross domestic product (GDP). The estimated coefficients showed that the oil & gas export variables have a positive impact and the oil price variable has had negative impact on business cycles in Iran.

Sachs and Warner (1995) proposed "Natural Resource Curse" hypothesis that believed natural resource-rich countries have lower growth rate relative to the others. Different models like Dutch disease, rent seeking, patronage, and destruction of institutions have been designed to explain the hypothesis. The emerging consensus believes that natural resource abundance is not the determinant of cursing or blessing of natural resources. In fact, what is the key driving force is the institutional quality of countries. The current paper investigates the causal relationships between the elements of good governance in the countries at the risk of natural resource curse to find a road map for the countries that want to escape or prevent from this curse. The paper reveals that two elements of good governance, i.e., control of corruption and regulatory quality, have higher priorities than the others due to their casual impacts.

In recent years many scholars have discussed the impact of development on democracy. In this article, by using a comparative study approach, we review the literature of the effect of development on democracy. We also, focus on recent debates, provided by Acemoglu (2001-2009) and his colleagues and Ingelhare and Welzel (2001-2009) who have offered two opposite views regarding the matter. Our aim is to compare the effective democracy with electoral democracy. While electoral democracy includes just the elections, Effective democracy includes genuine autonomous choice and the extent to which elites actually follow legal norms or elite integrity.This article shows that effective democracy will put an end to dispute about the effect of development on democracy and a minimum level of development is required for reaching to effective democracy. Therefore our findings theoretically reject Acemoglu and his colleagues’ view that development does not have any effect on democracy. Also, in this article it is shown that contrary to Ingelhare and Welzel’s theory there is not a linear relation between development and democracy and still many unsolved problems prevail.

With regard to the significance and high proportion of Iranian manufacturing industries' export in non_oil export basket and their impact on balanced economic growth in Iran, it is essential that effective factors on the manufacturing industries' export be investigated. This paper investigates the impact of human capital on the export of Iranian industries, using a panel data set of 2-digit ISIC manufacturing industries at Iranian provinces level, over the period 2000-2007.For that purpose, we use the number of workers with higher education degree (as a proxy for human capital) to examine the effect of human capital on the export of the manufacturing industries. The results show that human capital, manufacturing value added and nominal exchange rate have positive and significant effects on the export of the manufacturing industries. In addition, the domestic demand of manufacturing goods and terms of trade have significant negative effects on these industries export. Therefore, any effort to expand the higher education is highly recommended.

Classical theory of asymmetric information predicts a positive correlation between risk and insurance coverage. Using a sample of 69553 policyholders in Iran Insurance Company with optional items in the car’s body insurance contract, which provides significant and relevant information on the preferences of costumers, this research intends to test the prediction. Statistical tests have been conducted by the conditional independence Bivariate Probit model and Nonparametric Statistics which have been pioneered in Chiappori and Salanie (2000) and Chiappori et al (2006).The distinctive feature of the research is the use of individual data of policyholders in the oligopolistic Iran’s Insurance market. Our findings confirm realistic expectation and positive correlation in Iran’s Automobile Insurance Market (IAIM), which indicates a strict evidence of Adverse Selection or Moral Hazard in the market. These results imply inefficiency in IAIM and the existence of informationally inconsistent insurance contracts in the insurance industry of Iran.

Water is one of the most importance sources for provision of the human needs that plays a vital role in current life. Therefore awareness about water demand is important for necessary policy making for demand management. In this paper we modeled Tehran water daily demand by nonlinear Artificial Neural Network and linear process of ARMA for a 7 years period and forecasted the urban water daily demand for 10 days. The effective factors on urban water daily demand in designing of neural network are temperature (minimum, average, maximum), week days, holidays and special days. Results present that artificial neural network have higher power than ARMA in forecasting the Tehran city water daily demand on the basis of indicators of forecast accuracy valuation.