Public Administration and Employment in Zahedan City: The Comparative Advantage of Economic Activities and its Effect on Employment

Employment is one of the important and considered variables by policy makers at national, regional and urban levels. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate employment changes in Zahedan during the census period of 2006-2011 and the effect of changes in competitive advantage and structural changes on employment in different activities of the city during this period. The research method is descriptive-analytic method and regional programming models such as Location Quotient (LQ) and shaft-share model are used for analysis. The results of the Location Quotient model have shown that sectors such as "Public Affairs and Defense", " Transportation and Communication " and "Education" have been part of the advantaged sectors of the city economy. The results of the shift-share model have shown that the effect of competitive changes has been positive in the three sectors of "education", "health" and "business and real estate services" and has led to an increase in employment of these sectors.
Provinces and different regions of the country have different production and employment potentials. This may be due to several factors, such as the particular climate conditions and the region's particular natural resources. For this reason, each region and city of the country may have a comparative advantage in certain activity or activities. Hence, identification of activities that have an advantage in an area is important for recognizing and adopting appropriate strategies for economic growth and development in the region. As a result, regional and local planners and decision makers should identify the strengths and weaknesses of the economy. The planners of economic growth and development should be aware of the ways and the reasons for the Recession and boom of various activities in the local and regional economy to make the right decisions to address local and regional problems. Among economic variables, employment is one of the most important variable in economic growth and development in the region. This variable is influenced by different policies of growth and development. Also, in the current period, employment is the most important issue of policy makers at the national, regional and local levels, and all efforts of planners and decision makers in the country to address this unemployment problem.
Unfortunately, in the urban planning system in Iran due to the lack of spatial planning and the lack of an integrated urban management system, the role of cities in regional development and reduction of regional inequalities has been neglected (Safaei, 2003) . Also, urban planning has not paid much attention to determining the competitive advantages of cities for planning urban economic development (Hatami neghad & Hosseini, 2013). Therefore, in the present study, the comparative advantage of employment and employment changes based on shift share and Location Quotient in different activities of Zahedan city in Sistan and Baluchestan province are investigated.
Case study: The case study of this paper is the all economic activity in Zahedan Coty in Sistan and Baluchestan Province of Iran.
In this study, we use the Location Quotient (LQ) method to study the advantages of different activities in the economy of the Zahedan city. This method is used to identify the domestic and export sectors in different regions. In this method, the activities in the region are divided into two parts, the basic activities of non-basic activities. In the shift share model, the growth of employment in a region is divided into three factors. The part that caused by national growth, the growth resulting from the competitive advantage and the growth resulting from structural change in the region (the change in the composition of the region's activities).
Discussion and The results of the Location Quotient model have shown that sectors such as "Public Affairs and Defense", " Transportation and Communication " and "Education" have been part of the advantaged sectors of the city economy. The results of the shift-share model have shown that the effect of national component in all sectors was negative and resulted in a decrease in the employment of city of Zahedan to 4662 people. Structural changes have reduced the 1286 people in the total employment in Zahedan during the study period. The effect of this factor has been positive in 9 sectors of than 14 sectors and has increased the employment of the city. The results of the model in relation to the effect of competitive changes in different sectors indicate that this factor has reduced employment by 39638 people in total employment of this city. The effect of this factor was only positive in three sectors, which led to an increase in employment. These three sectors include "education", "health" and "business and real estate services".