Journal of Economic Research and Policies
Year:2017 | Volume:25 | Issue:82|Papers Count:13

Some of Special Economic Zones (SEZ) are the main locations for world trades. Shanghai (China) and Jebel Ali (Dubai) are two of most successful ones. Even though Iran has established more than 15 SEZs since the 90s and even more are on the way, their performance is highly doubted. The SEZ’s performance could be either due to their design, or, due to macro structure of the economy. Using a Difference in Difference (DiD) framework, we control for the overall performance of the economy and address the effect of SEZ establishment on Shahid Rajaee custom trade performance. Among about 20 SEZs, Shahid Rajaee is chosen because of its large trade volume, all-purpose targeting, and available data prior to being treated. Our data is disaggregated into 6digits of HS tariff codes, provided by Iran’s Custom. Our findings show that overall impact is significantly positive both on exports and imports; however, the impact on imports is about six-fold larger. A stronger pattern exists in some sections; i.e. plastic, chemicals, electrical machinery (including homeware) and transportation (including vehicles). The results are robust to many robustness tests.

Financial soundness of Iranian banks has not been comprehensively assessed and predicted yet, and most of the studies are related to predicting the bankruptcy of the listed companies in Tehran Stock Exchange. This research aims to investigate 17 financial ratios as the indicator of financial Safety and soundness of the banks in Iran with using CAMELS rating system in order to offer a model for the assessment and prediction of bank soundness. In this regard, we study the audited financial statements of 20 state and private banks for the period of 2009 to 2013. We test all the seventeen financial ratios in the panel data regression and stepwise method as independent variables and estimate their effects on banks Soundness. The results indicate that explanation power of the six ratios is 75.2% for bank's soundness. Also, Practical measures of the designed model show that prediction accuracy of the model is 70%.

Free entry and exit can increase the competition into a market. According to economic theories, it is expected that with increasing the entry barrier and decreasing the number of firms in the market, the monopoly degree increases in industrial markets. One of the structural components in the market is the entry barrier. The reason for the importance of entry barrier issue is that the existence of a barrier to entry (and also reactions of the existing firms into the market) can prevent from entering the new entrant in the market and leads the structure of the market to converge to monopoly. In this paper, in order to evaluate the entry barrier in Iranian industry sectors, we calculate Cost Disadvantage Ratio (CDR) index and the net entry rate. Moreover, this paper investigates effective factors on the net entry. The findings indicate the CDR index in the two-digit ISIC code industries is less than 1. The net entry rate is also negative in most of the industries, which imply a high barrier to entry in the industry. Results show the intensity of concentration, advertising intensity, research and development costs, returns and economies of scale also have significant and negative effects on net entry rate in Iranian industrial markets.

This paper investigates nonlinear effects of fiscal decentralization (from two perspectives: expenditure fiscal decentralization and revenue fiscal decentralization) on provincial government size by using statistical and economic information for 30 provinces of Iran during the period 2002-2012. For this purpose, we use control variables such as GDP per capita, trade, and population. This research emphasizes cross-dependency and using the Continuously-Updated and Fully-Modified Method (Cup-FM) econometric methods (Cup-FM) (presented by Bai et al. (2009)). The results show that the effect of fiscal decentralization indicators on the size of the provincial government is in the form of an Inverted U-shaped curve: in a way that the provinces lie on the ascending sector of this curve. Furthermore, estimated parameters of the control variables indicate GDP per capita, trade and population have a positive and significant impact on the provincial government size.

Education as well as industry and agriculture is one of the economic sectors in each country that not only produce services and directly affect on economic growth, but also one of the sectors that have an effect on the other sectors’ growth. In addition, the education sector to deliver any service needs outputs of other sectors as input. However, the role and importance of each sub-sectors of education on production, input consumption, and factors' income are different. In this study, by using the Social Accounting Matrix, the role of education is investigated in the Iranian economy. The results indicate that among the sub-sectors of education, Higher Education has more effects on economic production, factors’ income and inputs consumption compared than other stages of education. Moreover, according to the results, there is a strong linkage (including forward and backward linkages) between the education sector and other sectors such as wholesale, retail, repair of motor vehicles and goods, the manufacture of petroleum products, building materials, and chemical products.

The mining sector is one of the valuable sectors that have considerable effects on growth and development process in a country. In this paper, regarding the high growth rate in China in recent years and also plenty of mining resources in this country, we analyze the contribution of the mining sector in high economic growth in China with considering backward and forward linkages of this sector that can be calculated by using the input-output table. Then we address this sector in Iran and compare the role of this sector in these two countries in 2011. In this research, we assess the role of the mining sector in these two economies through the traditional method. Then with using the modern method, effectiveness of mining sector to other sectors is calculated by determining the net backward and forward linkages. The results show that the mining sector in the Chinese economy has the strongest backward linkage, but this sector's demands from other sectors (forward linkages) is less than the economy average. In another hand, mining sector in Iranian economy has a weaker position than Chinese's economy in both aspects (backward and forward linkages). These results show that output of the mining sector in Iran has not the sustainable trend that induces this output convert to raw material export and does not motivate domestic productions.

The importance of Research and Development (R&D) in economic growth and development has considered and theoretically and empirically confirmed by researchers. It can be said that the necessity of entering the global markets and developing the modern industrial sectors in any country is to focus on basic and applied research. This paper aims to investigate the impact of “the share of research budget in GDP” on economic growth in Iran during the 1969-2012 period. For this purpose, we estimate Iran’s economic growth model with emphasis on the role of the research budget share (% of GDP) by using the introduced model in Tunali (2016) and specifying a Markov Switching model. The estimation results indicate that the research budget share (% of GDP) has a significant and positive effect on economic growth in Iran. Moreover, the results show economic growth in Iran has two regimes, including a regime with high mean and variance (high-growth regime) and another regime with low mean and variance (low-growth regime). According to the results, the probability of staying in the low-growth regime is higher than staying in the high-growth regime. Finally, this paper suggests that to improve the economic growths, increasing in Iran’s budget in research is essential. In addition, funding applied research, which targeted to strengthen the national production, especially high-tech and knowledge-based products are useful for promoting the growth trend.

The growth rate is an economic development measurement that a higher level of this rate shows that the country goes toward the higher level of facilities and capacity in the economy. In another side income distribution, indicators describe an economy in different aspect and show that how facilities distribute among the people. Therefore, investigation of the relationship between the economic growth and income distribution indicators is very vital to set economic targets and strategies for countries. So, several theories address to the relationship. In this research, based on Lee et al. (2013), we analyze the relationship between economic growth and income distribution for the Meddle East and North Africa (MENA) countries during 1994-2014. In this regard, we use Spatial Durbin Model. The results show economic growth has a positive and significant effect on income distribution, while the square of economic growth rate has a negative and significant effect on income distribution, which indicates Kuznets's hypothesis is not rejected in the studied countries. Additionally, human capital has a positive and significant effect on income distribution. However, accumulation of population increases the inequality of income. Also, results of the spatial dependence test show that there are spatial relationships between the model variables.

Regarding the recent financial and banking crisis, corporate governance has gained a more important role on firms and financial institutes' success. Investigating the reasons for the failure of several firms and big banks, which has caused great losses for shareholders, shows that these losses are mostly due to weak corporate governance structures in these organizations. In order to answer the questions about the quality and quantity of the relationship between corporate governance and banking sector indices, we use panel data regression for a sample, including 15 selected banks from developing (D8) and developed (G7) countries during 2005 to 2014. In order to check the reliability of the estimated parameters, we used F-test and to choose between random or fixed effect models, we used Hausman test. The results confirm that corporate governance measures have a positive and significant impact on selected banks' profitability indices. It is also notable that the magnitude of estimators and their level of significance are different between developing (D8) and developed (G7) countries.

The productivity is the most important factor for industrial competiveness. Since the steel industry is resource-based and Iran has required natural resources for the industry, the steel industry has crucial role in the country’s economy. Therefore, this article examine the changes of TFP of four major Iranian steel companies including Khuzestan Steel, Khorasan Steel, Isfahan Steel and Mobarakeh Steel through a Malmquist Index for the period 1389-1393. The results show that TFP changes in the steel companies are deeply affected by the technical changes. The average of TFP annual growth for these companies is totally about 4 percent and their TFP changes trend is affected by the technical changes that confirms the importance of improving technology in the industry. The factors like equipment and machineries updating, link between higher education and industries, and attracting foreign direct investment which improve production technology, can improve the productivity of the steel industry.

The notion of Liquidity Preference has become generally used in the literature on Keynesian monetary economics. Highly liquid with If the speculative or the precautionary motive leads to people hold liquid in high level, It induces persistent or chronic stagnation. If marginal utility of Money is positive, it will be a measure for the monetary stagnation. In this paper, the stagnation of Iran’s economy is examined by using Endogenous Growth Model and dynamic optimization approach with relative risk aversion assumption. In the first step, we estimate real interest rate and elasticity of the consumption and elasticity of the money as variables that have main roles in the final model. In the second step, coefficients of the money and consumption in the utility function are estimated during 1975- 2013 with using Generalized Method of Movement (GMM). The results find the evidence that confirms the Keynesian monetary stagnation. However, change in the definition of money from Fiat Money and Credit to Electronic Money influence on the result.