Iranian Journal of Trade Studies
Year:2003 | Volume:7 | Issue:26|Papers Count:6

One of the most important economic challenges that the country is facing for the time being, is how to encounter the phenomenon of globalisation. The phenomenon has different vast effects on economic situation of Iran, and the auto parts industry is by no means an exception. In this paper attempts have been made to study the effects of the accession to WTO for Iran. In doing so, the Revealed Symmetric Comparative Advantage (RSCA) and Dynamic Domestic Resource Cost measures have been used to analyse the effects of trade liberalization and exchange rate on competitive potential and competitiveness of the producers of auto parts in case of accession to WTO. Furthermore, the effective factors on increasing the competitive potential and competitiveness of the companies have been studied.

This paper briefly reviews the literature on the endogenous growth models. Also for analyzing the determinants of the economic growth in the Iranian economy, as an oil exporting-developing country, two versions of economic growth models are estimated in the short and long run. We find that the economic growth is driven by the government expenditure and the revenues of oil exports and there is no dominant role for human capital according to endogenous growth models. In this study variables such as total factor productivity, education, and expenditures for R&D and social security are considered as human capital proxies. The paper discusses the implications of this finding for business cycle and its impact on the long run economic growth

With respect to importance of farm crops in Fars province, this study was conducted to determine the comparative advantage of farm crops. The data were mainly obtained from Ministry of Agriculture, Central Bank of Iran and World Bank resources. To determine the Comparative advantage of products two approaches namely, "Domestic Resource Cost" and "Social Benefit Cost" were used. The results of the study revealed that four crops, namely, rain-fed wheat, barley, sugar beet and sunflower had least comparative advantage. On the other hand, tomato, cucumber, potatoes and irrigated lentil had the most comparative advantage. Comparing the current cultivated areas of the crops with their comparative advantage ranking indicated that those crops, which their prices were relatively more stable had more conformity with their comparative advantage ranking. Finally, to bring about more conformity of cultivated areas of crops with their comparative advantages, some recommendations are made

This paper uses data on the cement industry of Iran to measure the market concentration. A brief exposition of the concept and measurement of industrial concentration and its application is presented. Two models of Concentration Ratios and Herfindahl Index are employed. The market concentration of the year 1995 is compared with the year 2002. The finding in this paper indicates that market concentration in the cement industry in Iran in spite of about 55% capacity increase (raising the number of cement plants from 19 to 34) in this period, is still very high. Some change has also occurred in the position of the big players

In order to expand economic and trade cooperation between countries of the world, the coherent prudent planning is needed. The prudent and coherent planning on the other hand requires sufficient knowledge about trade and economic capabilities of trade partners. In this paper, taking into account the above mentioned considerations, attempts have been made to identify the common grounds for cooperation between Iran and South Korea with a view to better utilizing the new opportunities in this respect. It has to be noted that in most empirical research in order to identify the trade potentials between countries indexes of potential complementarities have been utilized. In this paper by brewing on the ITC classification, the degree of trade similarity three digit code between the two countries is calculated. Then in order to precisely investigate the degree of similarity in different sub-sections group of 14 products the similarity index is calculated. Furthermore by employing TPI and RCA indexes the comparative advantages of the two countries are provided. And finally for promoting economic and trade cooperation between the two certain recommendations have been put forward

This paper considers the estimation of a technical efficiency model consisting of a Cobb-Douglas Stochastic Frontier Production Function for 6 major Iranian manufacturing sub sectors, using a panel of 70 Iranian sample manufacturing firms for the period 1994-1999. The maximum likelihood method is used to estimate the frontiers and derive the efficiency estimates, which are assumed to be time variant. The evidences suggest that the efficiency of Iranian manufacturing is declining both as a whole and in sub sectors.