JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT (THE ECONOMIC RESEARCH)
Year:2011 | Volume:10 | Issue:4|Papers Count:10

International trade expansion and export development have been the center of attention by the economists, policy makers and the cornerstone of planning in many countries of the world. Agricultural and industrial sectors are the crucial economic sectors in every country that have a parity role in preparing food for people and industrial inputs. This article using vector error correction models considers the simultaneous effect of economic policies on agricultural and industrial exports during the years 1971 to 2005. After testing the stationery, Johansen test was used for long run estimation. Results have shown that monetary policy has positive and significant effect on industrial and agricultural exports in short run, while interest rate and government expenditures have significant inverse and direct effect on industrial and agricultural exports respectively, and exchange rate policy has the same effect on industrial and agricultural export in long-run. Finally, the strength of each variable was investigated on export. It is recommended that increasing non oil export, the real value of interest rate is determined and by rising volume of money and then investing it and improving commodity supply, inflation will decrease and therefore non oil export will increase.

     Due to urbanization and consequent environmental problems in Iran, many people have been interested in improving the weather quality. Lack of information about health risks as a result of pollution is a big obstacle which stops policy-making in this regard. The present study examines the type of relationship between low air quality and Tehran citizens’ willingness to pay in order to improve weather quality. To achieve the goals two-stage Heckman method has been used so as to quantify the tendency to pay in people (WTP) for improving weather quality. A sample including 1010 Tehran citizens have been used according to random sampling method and the citizens have been interviewed face to face. The results have revealed that 55.7 percent of respondents are able to pay WTP and monthly average per person has been estimated about 3500 Rials. A Probit model for relationship between endogenous variables and WTP and a regression equation for getting the average willingness to pay have been used and what has been concluded is that age, income and the number of years spent in education have a significant effect on WTP and the women, and those suffering from respiratory diseases and habitants of polluted areas have more willingness to pay than others. Unlike developed countries, most respondents consider the government in charge of weather quality improvement and 44 percent of people were not motivated at all to spend money or make any effort to improve weather quality.

Due to the poor development of the domestic financial markets in Iran, a lack of efficient tax system and some restrictions on foreign borrowing in recent decades, the government budget deficit was mainly financed through borrowing from either the central bank or through the selling of the oil revenue dollars to the central bank, both of which led to increased monetary base. It caused to increase the rate of inflation as well. While printing money creates revenue through seigniorage for the government, it decreases the purchasing power of the money and people prefer to hold less cash money because of the inflationary effects of monetization of budget deficit and finally it will reduce the seigniorage revenue of the government. The aim of this article is to analysis seigniorage revenue in Iran using money demand function approach. The Johansen-Juselius Cointegration technique is used to estimate the empirical model using annual data over the period 1961-2007. The results of estimates show that semi elasticity of inflation rate is negative of 5/59 and the elasticity of GDP per capita is positive of 2/36 in long run. After first oil boom, seigniorage-maximizing rate of inflation, except during the period of war, is lower than the actual rate of inflation. According to the result, the economy is generally on the wrong side of the Laffer curve. The result does not depend on whether the expectations of agents form adaptively or rationally.

Regarding environmental importance and the lack of analytical methods for environmental policies, in this paper, shadow price for NOx and SOx emissions has been estimated for the Iranian electric industry. Input distance function is used for estimating shadow prices. The estimated shadow prices have revealed that the cost of Iranian electric industry for reducing one KG of NOx and Sox is 14991 and 17687 Rials, respectively. Estimated shadow prices in this study are greater than the amount offered by EPO (Environment Protection Organization) and World Bank. So it is recommended that any fine should be taken according to the emission shadow price.

This paper develops a New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSDE) model to study Iran's economy. The model considers the dependence of Iran's economy to oil exports. Oil sector and oil export revenues have been modeled as a separate sector and one of the government budget resources, respectively. Like in other New Keynesian DSGE models, firms face nominal rigidities with monopolistically competitive intermediate-good sector. Four shocks (productivity, oil revenues, money growth rate and government expenditure) have been introduced as the sources of volatility. The findings show that business cycle moments generated by the model and those of actual statistics from the economy are closely related. The model produces more volatile private investment and less volatile private consumption than non-oil output. Impulse response functions of shocks show that non-oil output increases in response to productivity, oil revenues, money growth rate and government expenditure shocks. Although non-oil output increases in response to government expenditures shocks, crowding- out effect of these expenditures cause output to decrease after some periods.

One of the key concepts in risk managing of financial portfolios is the probability based risk measurement method known as value at risk. During recent years, various methods have been introduced by researchers to compute this criterion. Because of their dissimilar assumptions and procedures, making the use of each of which creates different results. Therefore, this paper uses two main methods in order to measure the value at risk of foreign exchange portfolio. They comprise generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model and Monte Carlo Simulation. Using failure rate back testing, the results of these methods are compared. The results of the evaluation demonstrate that the mentioned methods have different performances.

Over the past decades, one of the most important indicators of the development and welfare was economic growth or any quantitative variables such as gross domestic product and income per capita. As long as the World has experienced a wide gap among rich and poor countries, economic growth as the only effective factor in welfare was questioned and consequently, gross domestic product distributition and other issues related to social justice raised as a distinghshed feature of welfare and development economics. Estimating welfare trend in Iran can mirror the policies imposed by policymakers. Therefore, this paper aims to estimate welfare index during 1974- 2006 period. In this paper MATLAB software is used to estimate welfare employing fuzzy logic model using Sen's appraoch. The results of this study show that inspite of high degrees of vacillation, walfare trend was ascending during the aforementioned years. The maximum value obtained was 0.715 in 2005 while the minimum value obtianed was 0.421 in 1994.