ECONOMIC RESEARCH REVIEW
Year:2015 | Volume:15 | Issue:56|Papers Count:8

Kuznets's hypothesis has been questioned even in developed countries these days. The measurement of income distribution and middle-class in the world economy shows that polarization of income distribution could limit economic growth, and cause fundamental changes in global economy. Three stylized facts emerge from review of experimental studies on the effects of inequality on growth and development: Higher inequality is more likely to harm growth; (1) through interaction with incomplete and underdeveloped markets for capital and information; (2) by discouraging the evolution of the economic and political institutions associated with accountable government (which in turn enable a market environment conducive to investment and growth); and (3) by undermining the civic and social life that sustains effective collective decision-making.This paper reviews the relation between growth and middle class measure around the world economy and Iran. Also has pointed to the channels through which the middle class may matter for economic growth in Iran. Determinants of the size and the growth of the middle class are also examined, by using relative and absolute middle class measures. The findings show that a larger middle class influences growth through higher levels of human capital investment. A relative middle class measure has more meaningful effect. The larger the government, the higher level of urbanization, the more openness, the smaller services ratio, the greater industry value added ratio to agriculture value added, as structural indexes are all affected with middle class.

Economists and environmentalists have come to the conclusion that the initial stages of economic development and growth result in worsening of environmental quality while in the later stages, the environmental quality improves. The relationship between income change and environmental quality has been referred to as the environmental Kuznets curve. In this paper, we have studied the environmental Kuznets curve for two types of pollution (air and water) using Mixed Model for the period 1988-2007 for developing countries. In addition to the variables of interest we include several explanatory variables. The results support the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis for both types of pollution. For air pollution, the countries with per capita incomes over 2235 dollars (fixed price of 2005) have passed the return pint of the curve and for water pollution the countries with per capita incomes over 3623 dollars (fixed price of 2005) have placed in the descending part of the environmental Kuznets curve.

Economic fluctuations and emergence of commercial cycles are inseparable parts of any economy. It is obvious that anti-cyclical behavior of fiscal policies will stabilize the fluctuations. In fact, if the ratio of government expenditure to GDP decreases (increases) during a boom (recession) the behavior of fiscal policy will be anti-cyclical. In this paper, using data released by the Central Bank for the period between 1966 and 2013, a model has been developed to test the anti-cyclical behavior of fiscal policies in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Findings of this paper indicate that, firstly, regardless of the calculation method of time series of GDP fluctuations– Hodrick-Prescott and State-Space models– the hypothesis of Iran‘s anti-cyclical fiscal policies is rejected. Secondly, Nonconformity of financial rules and means of injection of resources resulted from oil export into government budget are two crucial issues explaining why Iran‘s fiscal policies are not anti-cyclical. Thus, institutional reforms, especially budgetary structure of the country, could improve the performance of fiscal policies during the economic cycles.

Having looked at the economic history of Iran indicates that the budget deficit and it's financing has proved to be one of the important problems of governments. Acknowledging the securities requirements with purpose of Effectiveness in financing budget deficit through the IS-LM model constitutes the first part of this research. Findings of the first part denote that stability of budget deficit has recorded a condition which output has been increased. "Can sukuk contribute to this stable condition?" is the second question of the paper. Financial deepening, diminishing of symmetric information and little capital aggregation are characteristics of sukuk which give positive answer to this question.This paper proposes applying sukuk for budget deficit financing in two models: Ijarah sukuk and Istisna sukuk. The results denote that these securities can decrease the government's budget deficit.

In this paper, we have used four conventional, Adjusted, Generalized, and Adjusted Generalized RAS methods to update input-output Coefficients (IOC). Conventional and Adjusted RAS methods can only update positive and zero cells and are not sensitive to the existing negative cells like net exports and/or net taxes in Input-Output Tables (IOTs). To solve this drawback, analysts have proposed Generalized RAS (GRAS). This method can update positive, zero and negative cells. From the application view point, this method has two limitations: First, it is more focused on numerical examples rather than real IOTs. Second, extending the GRAS to AGRAS has not been attempted yet. The above limitations will lead us to pose the following questions: is it possible to extend Generalized RAS to Adjusted Generalized RAS? And which method has more statistical errors? For this purpose, we have used the two aggregated survey based IOTs of Iran for the years 1996 and 2001. Our findings show that it is possible to extend GRAS to AGRAS. Whit respect to the measurement of statistical errors, the following results have been obtained: first, the statistical errors of GRAS is lower than Conventional and ARAS, and the second statistical errors of AGRAS are much lower than corresponding figures in Conventional, ARAS and GRAS.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between Stock, gold coin and currency markets (as domestic markets), as well as, oil and gold markets and the U.S.A and European stock markets (as international markets) over the period of April 2001 to September 2013 using the Markov Regime Switching model and volatility spillover analysis. The empirical results in domestic markets showed that in low return regime, there is no significant spillover between markets so; the estimated value of spillover index is about 7.8 percent. In contrast, the value of spillover index in high return states is about 42 percent. Also, the results showed that when the world equity markets are in regime zero (low return regime), the gold market acts as an intermediary for the transmission of shocks from global markets to asset markets in Iran. In contrast, when the world equity markets are in regime one (high return regime), the oil market acts as a transmission channel of shocks.

In order to design the Islamic model of progress, explicating the concept of economic development within the religious paradigm put forth in Quran is the most fundamental mission. Based on the findings of semiotics, each word in Quran has a semantic domain; and the concept and the meaning of the words are best understood in the interrelation of their semantic domains. In the holy Quran, words like si‘ah, tamakkun, tamattu‘, imraan, fathul barakaat and hayaat tayyibah are the central words in the semantic field of economic development. Through a descriptive-analytic method and based on the techniques introduced in semiotics, this paper tries to explore and analyze the semantic elements and domain of the abovementioned vocabulary.The results of the research shows that the elements like sustainable growth, stability, sovereignty, social happiness, sustainable security, poverty alleviation, easy life, environment protection, saving and investment constitute the elements of the concept of economic development in the Quranic language.