JOURNAL OF THE MARCO AND STRATEGIC POLICIES
Year:2018 | Volume:6 | Issue:3 (23)|Papers Count:8

Various theories of national culture around the world affect legal systems, social norms, economic development, and political communities. In this regard, this paper discusses the impact of national culture dimensions on worldwide governance indicators. The is an applied research with quasi-experimental design and regressive approach. The population of this international study comprised all nations worldwide, thus 74 countries were selected as study sample using non-random sampling method. The paper used six national culture dimensions of Hofstede et al. (2010) as explanatory variables. The institutions composite of six worldwide governance indicators from Kaufmann et al. (2010) in the World Bank were taken into account as the responsive variables of the paper. It is worth knowing that both studies are highly cited papers. Based on the results, power distance has a significant and negative relationship with institutions composite, but individualism, long-term orientation, and indulgence are significantly and positively related to the institutions composite. These findings are discussed subsequently.

Estimation of the income elasticity of health costs is important in determining the policies adopted in health sector. Previous studies in this area has been done with the assumption of the model certainty; while ignoring the problem of model uncertainty can lead to bias and overlooking parameters that result is inappropriate forecasts and incorrect statistical inference. Thus, the main objective of this study is to estimate income elasticity of health costs in Iran under uncertainty of model from 1979 to 2013. For this purpose, the Bayesian approach was used because of its favorable characteristics for the assumption of model uncertainty. Estimation of 40000 regression and Bayesian averaging from the coefficients of the 24 effective variables on per capita costs of the health sector shows that per capita income is the most important determinant of these costs. The income elasticity of health costs is estimated approximately 0. 7, that shows health an essential commodity in Iran. Accordingly, we propose that health services be financed by governmental budget that is necessary in health services and provision. Based on other results, the effects of urbanization, per capita public health costs, dependency ratio, physicians per capita and the unemployment rate per capita are certain and strong on health sector costs in the long run.

In this research, the inflation rate, liquidity, bank interest rate, and exchange rate (the replacement for the dollar) are considered as economic variables. In addition, their impact on the structure of capital, which is the ratio of debt in companies, has been investigated. The method and nature of the present research is a correlational research and a combination of data approach was used for analyzing research data and estimating models. The study results indicate that three variables of inflation rate, exchange rate, and liquidity volume have a significant effect on capital structure, but interest rate does not have a significant effect on capital structure. Thus, changes in interest rates do not affect the debt ratio and the other two variables; inflation rate and the volume of liquidity have a negative effect on the capital structure. Hence, financial managers will pay special attention to the effects of changes in the inflation rate on the capital structure and the positive effects of the exchange rate when deciding the financials, combining the required cash resources, and studying the changing process made by these variables.

Investigation of factors affecting the savings is one of the important issues in developed and the developing countries in recent studies. The main purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between trade shocks and private savings per capita in Iran between 1963 and 2015. In this regard, the models were estimated using the GMM and OLS methods. In order to enter trade shocks in the model, standard Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter was used. This filter separates trade shocks (in terms of permanent and temporary shocks) and analyze their effects on per capita private savings. The results of the model estimation show that savings in previous period and trade shocks had a significant effect on savings so that they explained 78% of variance in savings. The estimation results suggest that the trade shocks have positive effect on savings, but trade fluctuations has a negative effect on savings. Temporary shocks have a greater effect on the savings compared to permanent shocks.

The main objective of this paper is to provide a method for analyzing and measuring the vulnerability and resilience index in Iran’ s economy. Economic resilience is the ability of a developed economy to block or mitigate the effects of negative shocks against what might intrinsically appear in an economy. The paper covers four aspects of macroeconomic stability, microeconomic market efficiency, government and social development, and examines Iran’ s economic viability and vulnerability index during the period of 1996-2016. The estimated indicators in this study are based on the selected variables of Bjerjalo et al. (2008) model. The results of this study indicate that from 1996 to 2004 and also from 2006 to 2014 and 2016 the net had a negative resilience, but this index was positive in 2005 and 2015. The most important reason for the positive value of this indicator in these two years were the existence of good governance and human development. In addition, both indicators of vulnerability and volatility have increased over the past few years, but the index of vulnerability is more than the resilience index, which indicates an increase in the degree of economic vulnerability in the Iranian economy.

The form and the extent of government intervention in the economy are important issues in each country. Because of the importance of the subject, the present article examines the relationship between government investment expenditures, private sector investment and other related macroeconomic variables with economic growth from 1989 to 2013. For examining the long-and short-run relationships between model variables, the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach and the stan-dard Granger-causality relationship have been used. Based on the long-and shortrun Granger-causality relationship, a one-way causality relationship from economic growth to government sector investment expenditures and a one-way causality relationship from the government sector consumption expenditures to government sector investment expenditures exist. Moreover, research findings show a two-way inverse Granger causality relationship between private sector consumption expenditures and government sector investment expenditures in both long-and short-run. Finally, there is no causality relationship between government sector investment expenditures and private sector investment expenditures.

Given the ultimate goal is to improve life and ensure a fair distribution of resources, the imbalance of development among the regions causes gaps and exacerbations of regional and spatial inequality and an obstacle to national development. Balanced development can consolidate convergence in a multi-ethnic society. This paper seeks to explain the relationship between national development and convergence in the geographic domain of Iran based on the country’ s socio-economic development plans over the past few years. A descriptive-analytic research was carried out using a linear topsy method to analyze 14 variables in geographic, infrastructural, economic and social dimensions. The findings indicate that the development gap in Iran has increased over the past decade. The results showed a direct relationship between development and cultural differences in Iran. Developmental attitudes are more under the influence of political-security conditions than planning. Thus, what consolidates national convergence is a systemic approach to development and use of environmental capabilities in national economic growth and participation of ethnic communities.

Business environment is one of the important factors affecting the economic growth and development. This issue depends on some other factors, and affects various contexts. Given the importance of the issue, regulatory authorities of countries and international organizations always evaluate its effects and propose operational guidelines to improve it. Because of the significance of the business environment index, this article investigate the effects of business environment on economic growth of 12 chosen countries of MENA Zone, using Generalized Method of Moments (GMM), from 2005 to 2013. The results indicate that business environment variables have positive and significant effects on economic growth. The only variable, which has negative and significant effect on economic growth, is regulations. This shows that cumbersome regulations cause a decrease in economic growth.