فصلنامه اقتصاد مقداری
سال یازدهم شماره 4 (پیاپی 43، زمستان 1393)

During recent years, globalization has been a substantial growth in different countries, and this event has been effective on many macroeconomic variables. In many countries, by increasing trade and financial openness, the size of government has been changed. Therefore, in this study, we have investigated the effects of trade and financial openness on government size in member countries of the MENA during the period 2002-2013. Considering endogenous explanatory variables using instrumental variables and using the error components three-stage least-squares (EC3SLS) estimator are distinguishing features of this study relative to previous studies. In accordance with the efficiency hypothesis, the study findings indicated that financial openness has a negative effect on the government size. Also, based on the compensation hypothesis, the results showed that trade openness has a positive effect on the government size. Generally, the results showed that the positive effect of trade openness on government size is greater than the negative impact of financial openness. These findings indicate that the government size in member countries of the MENA will increase in the face of economic globalization. Therefore, it is recommended that perform the privatization of the economy be implemented more quickly, and the role of government be changed from outsourcing to regulatory and policy-making.

In this paper, we highlight a new aspect of rent dependency of governments in oil exporter countries. The primary hypothesis in this paper is that oil revenue is one of the tax level determinants in the rentier states. We examined this hypothesis using panel regression analysis and unbalanced panel data from 14 oil exporter countries over the period 1990 to 2010. Our primary finding is that (oil and natural gas) rents are a significant determinant of the tax revenue level in rentier states, and each unit of rent revenues generates approximately 0.2 unit tax revenue for these governments. Our findings could be regarded as a new warning to rentier states’ governments because it demonstrates that in rentier states, governments are more dependent on rents than directly observed. Thus, we think that if oil rents significantly decrease in the near future, rentier states will be faced with more serious problem than they currently believe.

Economic policies in recent decades so that environmental challenges have become one of the most important concerns of policy makers. Reform of energy carrier price, is one of the government's economic policies in recent years that so far had widely the economic and environmental effects. In this study, we have tried using Robust least squares method (RLS), the effect of changes in the fuel price (Gasoline and Diesel fuel) on greenhouse gas emissions in the road transport sector during 1991-2013 to be tested. In order to accurate assess the environmental impacts resulting from reform of the fuel price, the road transport sector is divided to four sub-sectors; cars, buses, minibuses, trucks and tractors and the amount of emissions for each sub-sector of the existing fleet is considered. The results shows that with the increasing of Gasoline price in cars sub-sector, significantly reduced greenhouse gas emissions. But in other sub-sectors with rising Diesel fuel price significantly rising greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, by increasing the share of investment in transport sector to total investment, emissions in each sub-sector significantly have increased. Increasing of GDP per capita and urbanization leads to negative and significant effects on emissions in cars sub-sector. While this relationship is positive and significant in buses, minibus and trucks sub-sector.

Today, the food and pharmaceutical industries is as one of the well-known advantages industries in the economy. Invest in this industry is done in form of directly or indirectly (through stock markets). One of the most important components of the decision in the indirectly investment in this industries is awareness to the level of market risk of stock price of the active industries in this area. Due to the limitations of market risk measurement methods, in this paper, we proposed a comprehensive mechanism to measure of the stock market risk for food and pharmaceutical industries. This mechanism in addition to covering the shortcomings of the current methods of the risk measurement can extract the return risk of industries in the states of boom and bust and provide the possibility to compare the industry risk with other industries. Industries in this study include: the food, sugar and drugs for daily period of 1388 to 31.4.1394 by using of GARCH- Markov Consolidated models. The results showed that the return of the sugar and drugs industries follow from regime transfers and have got the asymmetric structure based on abnormal distributions. Also the risks for the medicine, food and sugar industries are respectively lower.

Among the several concepts encompassed by the idea of an equilibrium rate of unemployment the NAIRU appears as the more interesting one for a central bank since it focuses directly on inflation. The Phillips equation we consider is very close to the so-called "triangle model" suggested by Gordon, where inflation rate is determined by three factors: adaptive expectations and inertia, excess demand or shortage - estimated by the gap between the actual unemployment rate and the NAIRU - and supply shock variables. We regard the NAIRU as a time-varying parameter and estimate a state space model composed of a random walk process that describes its variations over time and of a Phillips equation and Okun's law. The estimation of the state-space model yields empirical results for Iran that shows average of NAIRU in the whole period is around 11.07 that is high in comparison with developed countries however the final state of NAIRU is 13.48. Such rate of NAIRU contains some important points for the policymakers in the case of inflation. In the other words implementing policies to reducing unemployment rate without increasing product capacities may lead to higher inflation so policymakers should focus more on enhancing labor and capital productivities and improvement of doing business indicators.

Tax is one of the most important sources of government expenditures, and an effective policy instruments in economic stabilization is economic resources allocation and also adjustment of income inequality. The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of tax revenues on income distribution and human development which regard to the relationship between income distribution and human development in theoretical and experimental issues can be used of "Human Development Index" as an indicator of income distribution. Hence, we use Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model for 1971- 2014 period. The results shows that with increasing share of direct tax revenues and reducing the share of indirect tax revenues of GDP, Human Development Index decreased and exacerbate inequality in the income distribution and also, unemployment rate decrease and oil revenues increase, will improve sustainable human development. At last, inflation has a positive relationship with the Human Development Index, although this relationship is not significant.