Iranian Journal of Trade Studies
Year:2006 | Volume:10 | Issue:39|Papers Count:11

Employing a multisectoral computable general equilibrium model, this paper estimates the impact of accession of Iran to WTO on her economy. The results show that the combined impact of tariffication of NTBs, unified 14 per cent tariffs on all imports and market access abroad for Iranian products will result to a meager gain of less than 0.5 percent of GDP. The impact on private consumption, national saving and investment will vary depending on the ways and means by which the policies are carried on. The much anticipated gains from market access will be less than 0.2 per cent increase in GDP and about 17 percent increase in non-oil exports. The results show that non-oil exports are strongly influenced by domestic policies such as oil revenue and its public management rather than WTO membership and its requirements. Revaluation of real national currency in particular, resulting from increased oil revenue can functionally operate like a subsidy to imports and a tax on non-oil exports. The key issue in the resolution of low non-oil exports in Iran has to do with the transformation of her inward economy to an outward one. In this regard WTO membership can help but this is far from sufficient to make the transformation.

Human capital is a very important factor in economic growth and development, filling the developing countries technological gap, reducing the role of natural comparative advantage and increasing the role of earned comparative advantage. In order to create this crucial factor, a significant amount of developing countries resources are spent on labor force training but when its time to cause productivity it goes out of developing countries in form of brain drain and cause them an irreparable harm. So knowing about the reasons behind brain drain can be helpful to prevent brain drain. The aim of this paper is to investigate factors which affected brain drain from Iran to Europe during the period 1359 – 1382. The existing theories and previous studies results indicate that brain drain depends on factors such as: unemployment rate, wages and salary in Iran and welfare index gap between Iran and Europe and the present model results indicate that: 1) Unemployment rate has a positive impact on brain drain from Iran to Europe. 2) Labor force payment (Wage and salary) has a converse and significant relationship with brain drain phenomenon. 3) Welfare index gap between Iran and Europe and its substitutions including, GDP, GNE and GCF per capita between Iran and Europe has a direct and significant effect on brain drain from Iran to Europe. 4) And the factors such as: war, political rights, civilian freedoms and corruption/bureaucratic red tape have positive and significant impact on brain drain from Iran to Europe.

In this paper, the effects of trade and exchange rate policies on the exports of industrial goods is estimated using a panel of 9 subsections of industrial sector of Iranian economy. Also, separate equations for the export of industrial goods, and for their imports are also estimated. In the export equation, the effective exchange rate and import tariff rate are directly entered, and the negative impact of import protection on the export side is estimated. Furthermore, in this equation, the input ratio (K/L) is also entered to specify the reaction of exports to factor accumulation. Export price function is also regressed on effective exchange rate; real wage and investment to output (i/y) ratio, but export prices do not show any reaction to (K/L). Import equation is defined in terms of tariff rate, K/L, i/y, and effective exchange rate. This specification is different from previous ones and estimated using new data. Results show negative, relatively large, impact of import tariffs on exports, and positive effects of devaluation on exports as large as half the effects of imports. Therefore, according to Edwards (1988), imposing higher tariffs could lead to further reduction of exports. Negative impact of tariffs on imports is as large as that on exports, and devaluation has negative impact on imports, up to half the effects of tariffs.

In Compliance with the promotion of non-oil exports and exclusion of an oil dependent economy, Iran's saffron with unique quality and considerable sales potential stand out as an appropriate commodity for exportation and constitutes a significant source of foreign currency for the country. In this research, we have estimated the import demand function of Iran's saffron, by the foreign countries using the panel data of trading bodies of the countries in this area in the period of 1990-2000. According to the estimation result of the applied model are in accordance with the theory, when price increases during the period of time, the export demand decreases and when the national currencies of importing countries increases, the demand for Iran’s saffron decreases. Therefore, besides considering the price advantages, there should be avocations polices plus removing the present barriers, as well as, paving the way for proper marketing.

This paper tests the validity of neo-classical predictions on beta and sigma convergence across OPEC countries in terms of real per capita GDP during the time period 1970-2004. The empirical results support the hypothesis of absolute beta convergence among OPEC countries. It means that, initially poorer countries (with low levels of GDP) grow at faster rate than initially wealthier ones. Furthermore, the speed of convergence is estimated 4.3 percent per year. This implies that, it would take about 32 years to close the gap between OPEC real per capita GDP. The examination of sigma convergence confirms that, dispersion of real per capita GDP levels between OPEC countries have decreased during 1970-2004. Finally, continuation of high population growth with low level of per capita income and investment would provide some obstructions for growth for OPEC countries. So the policies they should adopt must target these issues: enhancing capital accumulation either through domestic savings or foreign direct investment and investing more in human capital. At the end, according to the findings, regional strategies (i.e. in African and Middle East countries) also have positive effects on growth and convergence.

According to commerce ministry management’s foremost need for a model to appraise provincial commerce organizations, creating a quantitative model for appraising and ranking of provincial commerce organizations by compensatory multi attribute decision making (MADM) methods like “SAW, TOPSIS, classic taxonomy and non classic taxonomy” is core goal of this research. Ranking of provincial commerce organizations requires identifying effective attributes. The tasks, the authority’s limit and similar organizations appraisal models were studied and finally based on specialist thoughts, percent of official personnel to all personnel, quantity of personnel’s education, quantity of personnel, percent of explored wrongdoer units to quantity of inspections, percent of explored economic offenses to quantity of inspections, budget figure and quality of website services were preferred as research attributes. The research model was designed based on the soft decision techniques. After model designing, for premise limit time (2003), data was gathered by interviewing, evidence and statistical questionnaire. Aforesaid data situated on the model after doing some process on them. For analyzing research conclusions, “spearman rank correlation test” and “coefficient of variation” were used and recognized that “non classic taxonomy” is the most consistent technique to appraise choices. The aforementioned method, in favor of its instructive knowledge has ranked homogenous provincial commerce organizations with identifying seven non homogenous choices at some point in three stages. Therefore, “Hamedan provincial commerce organization” achieved the first position through homogenous choices.

With respect to the role of forecasting in trade policy of agricultural products, attempts were made in this study to apply Artificial Neural Networks for forecasting pistachio exports and compare it with commonly used ARIMA models. Official data for 1304-1382 were utilized for comparison of accuracy of forecasting in various models. The results of study revealed that Feed Forward Network had a better performance in comparison to other models.

In the last few decades effects of non-economic variables have been widely studied by economists. The effect of election, as political phenomena, on economic variables is one of them, which is discussed in Political Business Cycles Theory. Based on this theory, during pre-election period, politicians manipulate some economic variables in order to convince voters to re-elect them. On the other hand, there is an alternative approach which implies that the election causes an uncertainty situation which affects some economic variables negatively in short term and as long as this phenomenon is taking place periodically, due to election times, therefore is known by Electoral Cycles. This study assesses the feasibility of electoral cycle occurrence in Iran through exchange rate channel. The results imply that the impact of election on exchange rate and relative price of tradable and non-tradable good isn’t observable.

This article represents findings of a study which has examined preparation requirements in Iranian automotive companies’ infrastructures before joining WTO. In this research, Iran Khodro competitive situation (as a pilot to apply the results of research) is first modeled by SD tool for the time before joining WTO in comparison with other internal competitors, and then examine what would be the challenges and opportunities for Iran Khodro (in micro term) and Iranian automotive industry section (in macro term) after joining WTO and confronting foreign competitors, whether or not the infrastructures of joining Iran to bilateral or multilateral WTO negotiations are met? Finally, complementary policies regarding whether preparing infrastructures for automotive industry is necessary or not, is applied to model input and is then examined and tested.