Iranian Journal of Trade Studies
Year:2007 | Volume:11 | Issue:43|Papers Count:10

The business conditions and trade situation are subject to constant change due to different factors. A continuous study of the market changes and other influential factors on the marketing and export of the goods and service and sending the relevant reports to the top management and other sectors of the industry are the most important objectives of the marketing. To expand marketing and export of the hand woven carpet, the emphasis was on coordinated marketing approach along with five most important factors including: management, environment, strategy, segmentation and marketing mix. These factors are considered as the most important ones affecting the carpet market and are studied in the current and ideal situations. A questionnaire was prepared which includes the above five factors plus fifteen main variables and seventy eight relevant sub-variables to gather data from research samples which include: experts, exporters and dealers of the Persian carpet inside and outside of the country. The results express and confirm a meaningful relationship between five main factors and export marketing of hand woven carpet.Also some of the hypotheses of the research have been confirmed. The effectiveness of these factors receptively is: environment, marketing mix and segmentation, strategy and export marketing management. According to the view of those who have answered questionnaire, there is a difference between the five main factors in the present situation and the ideal one. This difference shows a failure in the current export marketing of the hand-woven carpet. The findings of the study have some implications for policy markers in this important industry.

The fast pace of growth in the volume of international trade and the phenomenon of globalization worldwide in recent years are rather amazing. In such circumstances it is necessary to evaluate and determine the advantages as well as the disadvantages of domestic industries so that the competitiveness of such industries can be maintained and improved. Among the different industries, the petrochemical plants can play a crucial role in expanding the non-oil exports and secure a safe source of foreign income for the country. This article studies the competitive ability of the Tabriz Petrochemical Complex as one of the leading petrochemical plants in Iran.We distinguish between the "comparative advantage" and the "ability to compete" concepts. The "ability to compete" refers to the competing advantage based on market prices which includes price distortions resulting from protective policies of the government such as subsidies and fines. On the other hand "comparative advantage" refers to cost advantages at equilibrium prices in a situation where there are no price distortions. In this article the competing ability indexes of the Tabriz Petrochemical Complex were computed by using the Unit Cost Ratio approach. The computations show that, on the average, the products produced by the Tabriz Complex can compete in domestic as well foreign markets if the opportunity cost of capital is excluded from the computation process. However, the comparative advantage index shows that the products of this complex face a comparative disadvantage.

After passing some instability in their political and economic relations during the past two decades Iran and the EU considered the establishment and restructuring of their Long-term relations through signing an appropriate trade agreement. The structure and scope of such an agreement were proposed by the EU under the title of TCA and the negotiation started in 2002. To date they finished eight rounds of negotiations with a sudden interruption in the mid 2005 due to the emergence of new tentions between the parties particularly in the field of Iran's nuclear policy.The main result of this study is that the "TCA" is a non-preferential agreement and therefore the market access issues are not relevant in such an agreement.Although the nature of "TCA" is non-preferential, from the middle of negotiations the EU asked for market access concessions for their products through the unilateral liberalization commitments for undertaking by Iran. This is a very important issue which has to be countered very firmly and appropriately by Iranian delegation. This study presents some points and guidelines and provides some recommendations in this regard. The other general commitments of "TCA" are related to observance of stand-still mechanism, most favored nation treatment, removal of all quantitative restrictions in imports and exports, tariff binding and compliance of the national rules and regulations with the WTO related rules that has been extracted in this essay as well.

A major challenge for our country is developing the exports, while at the same time reducing the administrative overhead carried by commercial and public administration organizations. Electronic Customs, the transformation of paper-based trade documents to electronic ones, and the corresponding redesign of customs procedures, seems to be a very promising approach to deal with this dilemma. This article investigates the role of the electronic customs on export facilitation. The findings of this research suggests that electronic customs provide trade facilitation via automation of the routine processes, standard documentations, creating the conditions for an electronic, paperless environment in which transactions between customs, trade and other government agencies would be facilitated and more efficiently monitored.

In this paper, an integrated model is presented which considers supplier selection problem and lot-sizing problem simultaneously. The proposed approach encompasses three phases and considers both quantitative and qualitative criteria in addition to inventory model. The inventory model contains purchasing, ordering, and warehousing costs. The fitness function is defined in a MODM model.The tackled problem, MLSSP, is a kind of complex combinatorial problems and consequently seems to have a high time complexity. A genetic algorithm is implemented to solve the model. In final section, validation of the proposed model has been achieved by solving two existing published problems and the same results achieved raised in an acceptable CPU time.

This paper surveys the effects of ICT on Labor productivity growth in Iran. In general the methodologies of investigations about ICT and Labor productivity relations are through production function. In this paper, we estimated the Labor productivity function with using of theatrical and empirical studies. We used the time series data 1971-2003and Ordinary Least Squares method.Results indicate that total factor productivity (TFP) and non-ICT capital have most positive impacts on the labor productivity growth. Also, human capital and ICT capital and have positive and significant effects on the labor productivity growth but these effects are small compared to former variables. Findings of this paper about ICT labor productivity are consistent with most of the investigations in developing countries.

To accomplish this research, a procurement company is selected to study. The purpose of this research is to study present status of goods supply chain in this company to show its weakness and strength points and comparing this situation with the condition of using SCM approach in this company. We studied the effect of this approach on increasing quality of services to customer and decreasing inventory cost. first, we reviewed of supply chain and its different definitions and principles in order to identify the effective factors on "improving quality to customer" and "decreasing inventory cost" so this factors are extracted based on theoretical foundation and experts opinions. For data gathering, a questionnaire is used with Likert range consisted of 50 extracted factors. The data was gathered, categorized and analyzed with methods of descriptive and analytical statistics in order to test the research hypotheses. We used TOPSIS method to order the effectiveness of factors base on their priority. The result of the research has approved our hypothesis and we identified the priority of effectiveness of the extracted factors.

Imports and the current structure of the world economy play an important role in developing countries growth strategies. Therefore, any change in Iran's imports will affect the production and growth. Hence, the investigation of different aspects of imports in relation to development requirements of the country is essential for policy purposes. In this article the long run pattern of import demands from major trading partners is investigated using almost ideal demand system model (AIDS) and seemingly unrelated regressions.The results indicate that Iranian long run import allocation is formed in one stage budgeting and depends on domestic sales. Homothetic and symmetry hypotheses are rejected. The imports from five major trading partners are necessary goods.Uncompensated down price elasticities of United Arab Emirates, Korea and France have the negative anticipated signs and imports from Germany and France have a complementary relation. Imports from Korea are strongly affected by import prices.

Establishing reasonable interaction and co-existence between license contracts and competition law requires the draw up regulation which observes both domains.The United States of America and European Union by provision of general competition regulation on one hand and codification of special competition regulation on the other hand have observed the necessitites of both domains.Unfortunately in our country not only there is no special regulation to cover all aspects of license contracts but also no general regulation so far has been drawn up.Although enactment the draft of "comprehensive law of facilitating competition and control and hindering monopoly formation" can fill the gap of general competition law but because of its generality, it can not forecast all the necessities of license contracts, so for the reason of wide use of these contracts in the field of industry and trade of our country, enactment of special regulation in this regard is urgent.

This research presents an integrated macro-micro model of the Iranian economy. The model consists of a macroeconometric model component, connected through a set of linkage aggregate variables to a microeconomic model of household incomes.We use this framework to predict the distributional consequences of alternative policy choices, based on household survey data for 1382 to 1390.Then, to get the aim of this research, we apply eight different kinds of alternative policy choices: the current trend of policy variables (such as fiscal and monetary variables) will continue, oil and direct and indirect tax incomes as fiscal policies will increase 10%, bank reserves and private sector credits as monetary policies will increase 10% and finally parallel exchange rate in fixed and floating exchange rate regimes as exchange rate policies will increase 10%.We then test the predictive performance of the model, by comparing its simulated results with the actual household survey data observed in 1381. We find that the integrated macro-micro econometric model can actually predict the broad pattern of the incidence of changes in household incomes across the distribution reasonably well. We find that increase of public incomes, including oil and taxes, lead to a decrease of inequality. GINI sensitivities to 10% increase in oil, direct and indirect tax incomes are about 0.01 %, 0.02% and 0.05% respectively. Increase of bank reserves and private sector credits lead to an increase of income inequality and GINI sensitivities to 10% increase in these variables are 0.02% and 0.04% respectively. And finally 10% increase of parallel exchange rate in fixed exchange rate regime leads to a decrease of income inequality about -0.9% and 10% increase in parallel exchange rate in floating exchange rate regime leads to an increase of income inequality about 0.38%.