Journal of Economic Policy
Year:2019 | Volume:10 | Issue:20|Papers Count:7

Workforce is one of the most important production factors, and, hence, its migration damages economic opportunities in the society. In this article, we examine the impact of governance institutions and economic factors on the migration of labor force from Iran between 2002 and 2012. In our study, we use theoretical foundations of the attraction pattern, and the estimation of relationships is done by the STATA software. We have surveyed the immigration of Iranian workforce to certain OECD countries that have the largest workforce share from Iran. The results of this study show that improvement of total governance index and its sub-indices including political stability, financial regulations, rule of law, and control of corruption in destination countries are the attraction factors. However, the lower quality of these indicators in Iran is the most important factor in exclusion of Iran's labor force through immigration. Furthermore, the effect of the performance indicators and the government effectiveness is not significant, and the rights of expression and responsiveness have negative effects on immigration. On this basis, the improvement of governance institutions in Iran can have an essential role in reducing immigration.

This study aims at the role of macroeconomic variables in the occurrence of stagflation in Iran's economy. We have tried to examine the effects of such variables as budget deficit, oil price, oil revenue, money quantity, interest rate, labor productivity, wage rate, exchange rate, sanctions and liberalization of energy prices on Iran's stagflation during 1974-2015. The results indicate that money quantity, exchange rate, wage rate and sanctions have positive and significant effects and oil price, oil revenue, interest rate and labor productivity have negative and significant effects on stagflation. Based on the estimation results, the coefficients of all these variables were statistically significant except for budget deficit and liberalization of energy prices. Since both inflation and stagnation are undesirable, inhibiting one would mean the aggravation of the other, which can impose social and political costs. Due to the negative effect of labor productivity and the important role of supply policies in improving business environments and eliminating stagflation, it is better to pay more attention to these policies. Also, all the diplomatic capacities in the country should be used to reduce the sanctions pressure and find ways out of them considering the important role of foreign interactions and their psychological effects on stagflation.

This paper aims to identify factors affecting the price and production fluctuations in Iran's economy with an emphasis on the housing sector. A New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model is designed for this purpose. This model of economy contains a representative household, a firm producing final goods in the housing sector, a firm producing final goods in a non-housing sector, a series of producers of intermediate goods in the housing sector and non-housing sectors, and a government monetary authority or an agent that is a combination of government and the central bank. The results show that a technological shock in non-housing sector has led to an increase in production and investment, a reduction of inflation in this sector, and an increase in household consumption expenditures. In the housing sector, too, the shock has increased production and investment. Given the relationship that has already existed between the housing and non-housing sector, the rise in the former has contributed to the production in the latter. A shock to the money growth rate, as a monetary policy, has boosted the inflation rate and the output growth rate in both sectors. Due to the higher elasticity of supply in the non-housing sector, the effect of the monetary shock on production in this sector is greater than that on the housing sector. Also, a shock in the government spending has increased production and inflation in both sectors and this impact on the price indices in both sectors is longer lasting than on production.

Employment needs new entrepreneurship and investments, which can be fulfilled by the financial sector. Since job creation has a critical role in developing countries, it is essential to identify the activities that can provide stable employment based on micro-funds. Labor-intensive and capital-saving technologies are the most outstanding components of the cultural sector, especially handicrafts. Thus, the cultural sector has great potentials for job creation, and its rapid growth in recent decades has made policymakers highly regard this sector. At both national and provincial levels, this paper examines the relationship between external financing and women entrepreneurship with regard to cultural employment. The research benefits from the data about the loans granted by 6575 Melli banks in Iran to finance handicraft activities in 28 provinces during 2005-2014. The results show that employment in the cultural sector has been positively and significantly influenced by external financing. Also, estimations reveal that regional investments and economic growth cannot increase cultural employment, which may be caused by a bias toward capital-using. Distinctively, evidence on gender indicates that, despite the lower per capita loans given to female entrepreneurs, they have had a positive effect on cultural employment in some provinces.

From the start of the new round of UN sanctions against Iran to the Lausanne Declaration, certain the political developments occurred (e. g. changes in the government and adoption of an interactive approach to foreign policy). These developments have had their impacts on inflation expectations. Based on the experience and global studies, the market rate of exchange (US dollar), the stock price index and the consumer price index (CPI) are all calculated on a monthly basis and considered as the estimates of inflation expectations. In this study, we extract the concession function of the economic planner in the context of a conflict economy and on the basis of conflict expectations of Drezner (1999 ), which is a theory of dynamic games. Then, we specify this function on the objective of decreasing the expected inflation. In this regard, three regression models were evaluated separately on the basis of the Autoregressive Integerated Moving Average with an explanationary variable (ARIMAX) and rolling regressions. The results show that inflation with a lag and liquidity have had positive effects on the inflation expectations. Political developments, including changes in the government and negotiating strategies with different lags have been effective in the reduction of inflation expectations. However, due to the long negotiation process, there would have been unknown changes in inflation expectations.

The study of the factors influencing the increase of government expenditures is one of the main issues of public finance. Many theories have been proposed in this regard and experimentally tested in different countries. One of these theories is that of fiscal illusion that links the increase in the government costs to citizens’ lack of true perception about fiscal variables. The sources of fiscal illusion are usually described with five main hypotheses. One of them is the hypothesis of the complexity of the structure of government revenues. According to this hypothesis, the complexity of the revenue system makes citizens unable to correctly determine the tax price of public goods. This makes taxpayers underestimate the tax burden for public programs and, thus, increases public spending. In this research, the hypothesis of the complexity of the government revenue structure in Iran's economy during the years 1982-2016 was tested. To this end, an experimental model was specified according to the conditions of the Iranian economy. The proposed model was estimated using Autoregressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) and Error Correction Model (ECM) methods. According to the research findings, in the Iranian economy, taxpayers do not have the fiscal illusion of the complexity of the tax structure, and the fiscal illusion of intangible taxes is not empirically validated. The results also show that, due to oil revenues, people in the society have a high demand for government spending, and the tax system complexity is not a reason for the increased demand for public expenditures in Iran’ s economy.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the technical efficiency of the manufacturing sector in Iran's provinces during the development plans after the revolution. This analysis focuses on the comparison of provinces in terms of manufacturing performance and the determinants of technical efficiency. The model used to measure that efficiency is based on the stochastic frontier approach (SFA) devised by Battese and Coelli (1995). The results show that the efficiency levels in the manufacturing sector are low. Even in the third development plan, as the best case, the average efficiency level was 0. 401, which is very low. Although the average technical efficiency has been low, some provinces have had a considerable performance in this regard. The highest and the lowest technical efficiency levels ever recorded are 0. 652 and 0. 202 belonging to Khouzestan and Sistan Balouchestan provinces respectively. Among the effective factors impacting efficiency, government ownership of industrial units and energy intensity are found to have negative impacts while enterprise size (i. e. the average value added of an industrial unit) has a positive impact on efficiency. The research also shows that provinces such as Kerman and Hormozgan, have had the highest average efficiency as compared to mega-industrial provinces. All in all, the most important policy which can be recommended based on this research is that, given the low efficiency level in the huge industrial sector, an increase in the efficiency can be attainable through economic management empowerment in public industrial enterprises and optimum allocation of production factors in the sector.