پژوهشنامه بازرگانی
پیاپی 70 (بهار 1393)

Nowadays, with the increasing role of knowledge-based economiy in the foundation of economic growth and development, and also highly complex and competitive environment prevailing in the international markets, the importance of innovation in economic policy is much more, so that all countries are trying to determine factors of the infrastructure development of innovation. Researchers have identified several factors as determinants of innovation; human capital is one of the most important of them. For this reason and due to the technology gap between Muslim-majority countries to developed countries, this study is trying to examin the determinants of innovation, with a focus on human capital component in selected OIC countries during the period 2009-2011. Results show that the impact of human capital variables (both in general and in the case of sub-indexes (level of education, training and research and development at the university level), the innovation is meaningless. The results also show a positive effect of institutions, infrastructure and business development on innovation.

Since the information on the Iranian markets as a developing country are not complete and clear and market performance in different provinces of Iran is not unified and competitive, so the prices of goods in certain markets are not identical. The main purpose of this paper is to examine price-level convergence hypothesis and convergence speed among Iranian provinces over the period of 2007 through 2012 by adopting pair-wise approach which has been recently developed by Pesaran(2005). In this approach, the time series models (ADF, DF-GLS and KPSS unit root tests) have been applied. The empirical results indicate that according to the ADF and DF-GLS tests, the price convergence among the Iranian provinces have been poor and based on the KPSS test, in half of pair provinces, the price convergence have happened. Also, the average speed of convergence has been estimated around 1.8 months.

Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) have become an integral feature of today’s international trading system. The paper addresses the issue of horizontal allocation of judicial jurisdiction between the dispute settlement mechanism of regional trade agreements and that of the WTO. After having examined principles of international commercial law, the paper suggests that in the current state of international law, no rules seems to offer any effective answer to resolve conflicts of jurisdiction in the context of the WTO Agreement and RTAs. It is thus for states to decide how the dispute settlement mechanisms of the WTO and RTAs should operate and interact with each other. And this paper concludes with pointing to areas of discussions.

This paper investigated the environmental consequences of economic growth and foreign direct investment in developing countries during 1990-2010, using panel co-integration test and FMOLS method. The CO2 emission is used as a proxy of environment quality. The results confirmed Environmental Kuznets Curve in developing countries. In other words, there is a reverse-u shape relationship between economic growth and environment quality. Moreover, the results of non-linear model show that the foreign direct investment inflows led to increase CO2 emissions, monotonically. Hence, there is not any reverse-u shape relationship between foreign direct investment and CO2 emissions. In other words, the pollution haven hypothesis is confirmed.

This study examines private investment behavior in industry sector by considering the role of public expenditures (development and non development) and macroeconomic uncertainty in Iran economy during 1971 to 2010. After investigating time series properties of data, co-integration and vector error-correction models are used to obtain the estimates of the co-integrating relations and the long-run dynamics, respectively. The uncertainty measure generated from an exponential generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic (EGARCH (1, 1)) process. The results show that public development expenditure stimulates private investment in industry sector, whereas public non development expenditure is harmful to private investment. Moreover, macroeconomic uncertainty depresses private investment in industry sector of Iran.

In recent decades the issue of income convergence has attracted the attention ofpolicy makers and researchers. Most of these studies seeks to answer the question whether the country's per capita income over time would converge to a common level or not. Income convergence is defined as a decline in a country's income gap to an average per capita income so that more income gap shows less convergence.This study examined the existence of income convergence or divergence in D-8 countries during 1965-2009 using unit root test in non-linear framework. This test with considering the possibility of non-linearity of the income gap has a significant impact on the conclusions and diagnosis of income convergence. The results show that hypothesis of converging per capita real incomes to group's average per capita income in all countries except Pakistan and Nigeria is rejected.

After 20th century which was industrial economy century, the 21st century is information and knowledge era. In knowledge economy, intellectual capital is preferred as a new criteria in wealth creation compared to tangible assets. So in this era, intellectual capital has been the most important organization’s and industry’s weapon in international competition. The purpose of this article is studying the situation of human, organizational and relational capital in carpet industry. In the industry, human capital was surveyed in 2 dimensions: carpet makers and exporters which the carpet makers are full of competencies; but exporters have just a little information about internet marketing and e-commerce.The results of using Pearson test show the positive and meaningful relationship between intellectual capital dimensions with competitive advantage acquisition.Then by applying fuzzy topsis technique, intellectual capital 46 sub criterias and competitive advantage 28 sub criterias were categorized in which “create and use inter organizational information networks”, “ability in recognizing customers needs” and “create and use customers database” were selected as the most important intellectual capital indices, market intelligence and expert personnel were the most important indices among all competitive advantage criterias.Finally we can present some suggestions to hold carpet market share as: “Educating exporters with international marketing, export and e-commerce”, “applying information technology for marketing and advertisement” and “vast focus on market research to identify customer’s needs in every geographical area”.