Iranian Journal of Trade Studies
Year:2007 | Volume:11 | Issue:41|Papers Count:12

Subsidies have remarkably grown from 4888 billion Rials in 1374 to 23035 billion Rials in 1384. Yet, the poor have not gained much. For example, in energy subsidies, 20 percent of the richest people have gained about 15 times more than the 20 percent of the poorest people. This is because the payments of subsidies are unified and not targeted. Increasing subsidy, budget deficit and low incidence of the poor are the main reason why Iranian government made a decision for targeting subsidies. In fact, targeting subsidies is necessary to distinguish poor families from non-poor families. The survey of targeting methods in 30 Latin American countries indicates Proxy Means Test in developing countries are the best method for targeting subsidies. Therefore, this study employs this method to identify the poor and the non poor. The results show this method could distinguish 79 percent of the poor families, and 21 percent of poor families are identified as non poor families. Moreover, this method identifies 83 percent of non poor families and 17 percent of non poor families are identified as poor families.

This article surveys the effects of the Agreement on the Trade Preferential System among Islamic Countries (TPS/OIC) on Iran's trade flows and tariff income. The analysis has been performed in the framework of a partial equilibrium model under the tariff reduction scenarios. The results indicate that while this agreement would have some effects on OIC member's trade creation and diversion and would enhance Iran's exports and imports, it would widen Iran's non-oil trade deficit with other members due to Iran's higher tariffs. It would also reduce Iran's revenue despite higher imports.

Nowadays, regarding the needs and preferences of consumers is the main condition of competitiveness in global market.  In other words, consumers have the important role in the determination of global demand. Thus, the selection of the target market, as a first step in identifying the willingness and expectation of buyers in every market, is very essential. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to identify the target markets and its entrance barriers. Based on RCA criteria, some of food export productions are chosen, and ranking of markets are identified by TOPSIS method. Finally, the entrance barriers of these markets, such as health and chemical standards and also tariff barriers are evaluated.

Industrial property laws are among broad and important fields in intellectual property law that has an especial situation in international trade law. Nowadays, the share of goods which are subject to industrial property law has developed considerably in international trade and business of countries. There is also the breach of this law in broad level. This fact, justifies the provision of especial measures and enforcements which can control the adversative and prohibit more offence and broader breach of right of industrial property law. The countries have paid attention to this fact from many years ago, and also provided customs enforcement in addition to criminal, civil and administrative enforcement in their own protective regulations. The importance of fact has not been ignored in international agreements on protection of intellectual property and the member countries in Pairs Agreement have been obligated to adopt the border measures against counterfeited goods in industrial property area. Also, in enforcement part of (TRIPS) a major share has been allocated to custom enforcements. But, in spite of the importance of this fact, the custom enforcements have not had a suitable situation in limited regulations which are provided on protection of industrial property in our country. This article, considers the situation of custom enforcement in Iran, comparative law and international instruments.

It goes without saying that the insufficient transport infrastructure and the inefficient services will directly affect the costs and the time needed for goods to reach destination. An improvement and progress in the country's infrastructure can make a big difference in the costs of trade. Studies show that a 10 percent increase in the transport costs (largely due to poor infrastructure) has caused a 20 percent decrease in trade.This article tries to quantify the effects of transport infrastructure (rail and road) in the ECO region on the regional trade activities of Iran with other members of the organization. We hypothesize that there is a meaningful and positive relationship between the transport infrastructure and the flow of trade. Utilizing panel data and the gravity model, the article shows that the volume of trade decreases if the transport costs (geographical distance) increase and the availability of the transport infrastructure increases the flow of trade.

IT and Business Strategy alignment is an essential issue for IT and business executives. This paper presents survey results of assessing IT and Business alignment level in an organization using modified version of Luftman’s strategic alignment maturity model. It outlines basic concepts of IT and business alignment and then describes modified version of luftman’s strategic alignment maturity model. Measurement of the importance degree of alignment factors in organization indicates that partnership factors, governance factors and communication factors are the most important factors in this organization.Assessing of alignment level in under survey organization indicates that it is placed in level 2 or "communication process" level. In this level, due to limited awareness of organization about different functional usage of IT, alignment is difficult to achieve. However, the potential opportunity is beginning to be recognized. Finally, some long term and short term solutions for improvement of IT and business alignment in organization is proposed.

The flow of international trade has been the subject of abundant empirical research. One reason for this degree of attention has been wide applicability of estimated income and price elasticities to a host of important economic policy issues. With the more activity of WTO member countries were forced to change their trade policies and liberalize their trade. This article analyses the impact of trade liberalization on import demand functions, at the disaggregated levels in IRAN. This study follows of the imperfect substitute's model and generalizes tariff and non tariff variables to it. Then import demand functions, at the disaggregated levels are estimated with use of cointegartion approach in period of 1981-2003. The result indicates that import demand will be increased up to 50% due to trade liberalization and composition of imports changes in favor of capital goods.

Trade fairs are known to be an excellent marketing tool to penetrate target market (s) with maximum efficiency. However, an increasing number of exibitors show willingness to perform cost-benefit analysis and, as far as possible, quantify possible benefits.In this research, a population consisting of 313 manufacturing firms participating at least once in khorasan international trade fair were sought to measure such business performance and economic effect. A sample of 76 top managers (mostly sales managers), represented 24% of the population were provided with questionnaire.Prior to distributing questionnaire, the survey instrument was pre-tested on ten firms to assure that respondents were not troubled by the questions. The reliability was confirmed through face method and validity through determination of Cronbach rate 93%. In order to analyze the collected data and to test research hypothesis, Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test, Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test and T-Test were used accordingly. The study showed that participation in khorasan international trade fairs promoted the image of particpants and market standout against competitors, increased sales, improved customer contact, but did not led to attraction of new customer from visiting targeted groups.

Stock prices are among the most complex economic variables that are hard to predict. They are very sensitive to many social, political and economic changes and subject to wide and dramatic fluctuations. In this paper, we have used a set of linear and nonlinear models to forecast daily and weekly Tehran Exchange Price Index (TEPIX) using data in period 1377-1382 (1998-2003). The models are ARIMA, GARCH, ARFIMA, and ANN. Our dynamic forecasting results evaluated by RMSE, MAE, and U-Thiel indicate that the ANN model outperforms the other models. The Diebold-Mariano test results, however, show that the differences are not significant.

Know –how evaluating and pricing is a complicated activity. The complexity of technology and know-how pricing has provided difficulties for enterprises that lead them to avoid using scientific method for pricing. On the other hand they have to use a very authoritative pricing method in commercializing process. In this paper, we used a model to evaluate know-how systematically and then price the technology based on experience and Heuristics. Then the model is tested with the real cases in research institute of petroleum industry.