The Economic Research (Sustainable Growth and Development)
Year:2010 | Volume:10 | Issue:3|Papers Count:7

The aim of this paper is to investigate the role of producer cooperatives (PCs) on rural development in Fars, Khorasan, Semnan, Golestan and Hamadan provinces of Iran in 2007. More specifically, this paper focuses on the economic aspects and social changes occurred in rural area concerning the cooperatives development. In order to measure quantitatively the effectiveness of economic and social changes, we included per capita income, factors productivity, expansion of rain irrigation, technology changes as economic indicators and the rate of participation in social activities, rate of migration and job creation as social indicators in the model.The findings based on 212 Producers Cooperative sampling data in the selected provinces show that the PCs have played a positive role in preventing migration to urban area. Moreover, the PCs have statistically significant and positive effects on the production, employment and labor productivity in this sector. In addition, in some areas they contributed to develop commercial agriculture.

Nowadays, New Institutional Economics (NIE), as the most important heterodox school of thought in Economics, is not only against mainstream, but also supplement. Therefore, due to the lake of adequate representation, the neoclassical economics is sever to explain issues in developing countries, recognition and the use of institutional analysis in solving development problems. Amongst NIE’s, three theorists and Nobel laureates are prominent. They are Ronal Coase, Douglas North and Oliver Williamson.In this article, the most prominent theories of Williamson, Nobel laureate in 2009 for Governance, are discussed. According to his articles, the most important contribution of Williamson to NIE can be summarized in four categories as follows:• Transaction cost economics• Bottom up approach in analyzing development issues • Four levels of social analysis as a starting point in development reform and • Economics of governance. These theories and more specifically, bottom up approach and four level social analysis have a good power in explaining development issues in Iran.

This paper aims to evaluate the relationship between exports diversification and productivity for nine Iranian manufacturing industries using a panel data approach. Empirical results indicate that productivity and exports have similar trends over the period considered in this study. Indicators such as capital-labor ratio in sub-sectors of the manufacturing and the real effective exchange rate have positive effects on productivity. Exports diversity index has also a positive and significant impact on productivity such that one percentage change in this index increases productivity by 1.8 percent. The effect of trade liberalization on manufacturing productivity is negative and negligible, implying that, to promote productivity, policymakers should consider other fundamental and institutional factors in addition to the foreign trade.

Economic development is one of the major policies of a country which is concerned to industry and technology on one hand and leads to environmental pollution on the other hand. The experiences of developed countries show that economic development with emphasis on the industry sector, without any attention to environment, can create serious problem against sustainable development. Industrialization has caused increasing energy consumption and therefore air pollution. It's so important to consider the relationship between industrial activities and industrial pollution in developing countries, because industry sector has a basic role in development process of these countries.Therefore the aim of this study is examining and qualifying of linkage between industrial activity and air pollution, using an industry-level dataset of IRAN manufacturing industries during the period 1995-2007. The result of study shows that air pollution is a positive function of energy consumption, industrial activity and physical capital intensity and also is a negative function of labor productivity, fuel price and human skill intensity.

Exogenous shocks and economic fluctuations led to extensive changes in households’ savings. Changes in household savings can also influence macroeconomic indicators. Thus in this study, the impact of household savings on household Income and GDP are examined using a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model.In the literature, there are two static and dynamic general equilibrium models. We apply the Mixed Complementary Problems (MCP) method using the Iran’s time series data. Two different scenarios are considered in this study. In the first scenario, marginal propensity to household savings will be increased twenty percent while in the second scenario marginal propensity to household savings will be decreased by the same rate. Furthermore, we updated and developed a Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) for Iran.The following results are obtained. Using the static model, the results vividly indicate that the urban and rural household incomes have increased 0.31 and 0.5 percent, respectively, through the supply of labor and capital in the first scenario. Moreover, GDP has also increased. The results of the dynamic model in the first scenario show that the rural and urban household income increased by 6.42 percent. However, in the second scenario it declined at the same rate as the first scenario indicating the fact that there is a positive relationship between household income and their savings. GDP has increased on average by 6.41 percent based on the first scenario. In summing up, it is found that by the implementation of the second scenario, the opposite results are obtained.

The purpose of this study is to introduce an index for calculating transaction costs in Iran over the 1984-2006 period. In order to calculate the transaction costs, Fuzzy Logic Approach is employed using MATLAB software. Based on the literature review, the determinants of the transaction costs are identified. They mainly comprise the standard deviation of the inflation rate, economic freedom, cash ratio and the ratio of public costs to GDP. Three scenarios are considered to calculate the transaction costs.Overall, the result shows that there is a cyclical trend in the transaction costs over the period considered in this study. The transaction costs decreased after the period of war - 1372-1374 - in all three scenarios considered. Following this period, however, the transaction costs has an upward trend and continued to increase until 1381 in all scenarios. After this increasing trend, the transaction costs have again decreased in the three scenarios.

Bank credit is an important source for the finance in agricultural sector. Agricultural credit is expected to play a critical role in agricultural development. Since the banking system supplies lower interest loans, there is a higher demand for financing agricultural activities. Consequently due to the resource limitation, there is always excess demand in the credit market. So, implicit rationing has taken place.The objective of this paper is to investigate the effects of agricultural credit on the major socioeconomic indicators of agricultural sector. Tobit approach is employed to model and estimate the specified empirical model. Both primary and secondary data are used in this study. The secondary data are collected through questionnaire and face to face interview with farmers.The results show that the debt indicators, assets, promotional agricultural education, location of the farmers with respect to bank branch and family size are the main determinants of agricultural credits.