Iranian Journal of Trade Studies
Year:2008 | Volume:12 | Issue:46|Papers Count:18

Nowadays, one of the biggest problems of national industries, is the lack of competitiveness. Some of the experts in this field believe that national competitiveness has close relation with corporate competitiveness. Thus, in this paper, we're going to design a model for measuring corporate competitiveness. With regard to this model, a corporate can gain current approach and position and forecast the future one. Iran's National Petrochemical Company (INPC) has been selected for this survey for different reasons. This Company in Iran not only is as a company, but also is as an industry. Also it had been in internal and external markets actively. For designing this model, firstly literature of this field has been reviewed that caused to exploitation of different theories, models, frameworks, and approaches of national and corporate competitiveness. According to this literature review, main approaches of corporate competitiveness that were used in the proposed model are systematic, resource based, market based, and asset-process-performance approach. With respect to these approaches, the proposed model has three components: corporate resource, position of corporate in market, and the ability of creation and innovation. This model is confirmed through factor analysis and structural equation model. As a result of this research, INPC competitiveness has the corporate resource approach. It suggested INPC must shift to the mixture of corporate resource approach and ability of creation and innovation approach.

Recently, the study of international business cycles and their transfer among countries has been a controversial issue in the literature of regional cooperation. Moreover trade in goods and services are considered as the most routine and rather vaguest channel for transferring economic fluctuations. Since ECO is one of the main trade cooperation organization in the Middle East, in this paper the attempt was made to study the role of international trade in business cycle correlation among ECO members (excluding Afghanistan) during 1993- 2006. The OLS method was applied to test the hypothesis.The results indicate that the international trade had major role in business cycles correlation among ECO members during the period. In addition, two dummy variables of the model, i.e. common border and language had significant role in business cycles correlation.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate and study intra industry trade (IIT) types between Iran and EU with respect to recent literature developments in IIT measuring during time period 1997- 2003. Results indicate low but increasing IIT between Iran and EU. Furthermore, an important part of this IIT is devoted to vertical intra industry trade (VIIT). Marginal IIT between Iran and EU is also low but overwhelming. In other words, foreign trade change between Iran and EU is mainly inter-industry trade. Furthermore, manufactured products, chemical and related products are leading industries in IIT between Iran and EU. According to the results, it is advised to consider IIT types’ determinants such as horizontal and vertical differentiation, economies of scale, R&D expenditure, FDI, economic integration; as well as taking care and promoting of current comparative advantages.

Enterprises seek competitive excellence in traditional markets through hard working and relying on their resources and capabilities; in modern and electronic markets through applying information and communication technology (ICT). In such markets they determine their competitive advantages based on informational and relational competencies.The enterprises can define their electronic (or internet) marketing strategies based on informational and relational competencies, but the success and effectiveness of such strategies depends on the existence of operational competencies in an enough amount. Then based on informational and relational competencies an enterprise can achieve competitive advantages and define internet marketing strategies, but these strategies will not be successful unless having appropriate operational competencies in order to implement them.In this study the objectives were (1) identifying enterprises’ needed competencies and competitive advantages in internet market and (2) evaluating the amount of the competencies and competitive advantages in Iran’s enterprises which are ranked in IMI100. The data gathered from a sample with 44 companies, which 32 ones were analyzable. The data analyzed through T-student analysis.The findings show that informational and relational competencies of the surveyed enterprises in electronic markets are relatively high, but their operational competencies are seriously low.

Despite all the advantages of Iran’s tea industry in fields of production, processing and trading, it has not succeeded to find a competitive position in the international tea market. On the other hand regarding the special position of tea in each Iranian family an d the dependency of more than 60,000 families to growth and production of tea, a suitable strategy and structure for Iran’s tea industry seem necessary. In this paper we have studied the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of tea industry based on Porter’s diamond model. Research shows that lack of an integrated management view in the tea supply chain is the most important factor in Iran’s tea market failure.Study of Kenya's tea supply chain as a leading country in tea production and marketing shows that this factor (integrated management) can play an important role in the industry's success. Findings of this paper show that developing supportive structures in different segments of the tea supply chain and integrated tea supply chain management can play an effective role in creating other supportive mechanisms and the advantage of tea competitiveness.

This paper aims the survey of possibility of Iranian export development to her selected trade partners. These partners contain 26 major trade partner of Iran which trade balance of Iran and them has been at least 100 million US$ during 1999- 2003.In this paper, the degree of trade complementarily between Iran and each country has been measured using the cosinus criteria.The results show the most possibility of Iranian export with her partners is with India. Japan, Korea Rep., Thailand, Italy, Sweden, France, Spain, the Netherlands, China, Germany and Ukraine because Iranian exports had highest complementarily index with these countries' imports. And also during the mentioned time, the structure of these countries imports and the structure of Iranian's exports has promoted the possibility of export to them.

Today, competition in global market from one hand and scarcity of resources on the other hand show the necessity of productivity consideration. Since woman can make a big difference in economic development after they enter into the labor force, this article tends to examine different indicators of the productivity of women entrepreneurs.The results show that indicators of growth of sale, innovation in production, process production, market, financial needs, achievement of authorily and reputation in the sociaty, job satisfaction and balancing between the work at home and outside are effective in the productivity of Iranian woman entrepreneurs. Among these indicators of productivity, innovation in production and balancing between the work at home and outside are the most important ones.

The aim of this paper is to explore the impact of trading partners' economic growth on the Iran's economic growth over period of 1338 to 1384 (1959 to 2005).For this purpose, an econometric model - Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) - has been used. The empirical results indicate that in the long run, trading partners’ economic growth have a positive and significant effect on Iran's economic growth. In addition, convergence relation among trading partners’ economic growth, Iran's economic growth and other variables of the model, has been ratified. Investigating the robustness of the results, there can be found a positive correlation between trading partners’ economic growth and Iran's economic growth. The stability test inquiry on the estimated models shows that the estimated coefficients of model are stable over long run.

Since the objective of this research is to study the effect of government expenses on national saving rate, by considering other items as fixed, this presumption based on reverse relation between government expenses and national saving rate is examined through econometric methods of vector auto-regressive, and vector error correction model. The results of mentioned models show that effect of changes in government deficit on national saving rate is positive in long term, and negative in short term, which is going to be neutral after a while. It should be mentioned that due to inevitable role of economic growth on national saving, it has entered into the model as an independent parameter, and the results of estimations show that it has positive effect on saving rate either in long term or in short term, which is compatible with economic theories.