nahid pourrostami

The experience of population aging in Japan and the effectiveness of various policies implemented in this country have important lessons for population aging in the next two decades in Iran. This experience shows that firstly, the implementation of the policy of increasing the fertility rate after reaching a minimum level is more complicated than expected and probably ineffective. Such an issue led to the reform of Japan's policy and the adoption of approaches for a society independent of people's age. This means that people of any age can play an active role in society with their maximum ability. The second lesson is the influence of the nation's historical memory on their future policies and how governments deal with past experiences in making future decisions. Applying mixed and multifaceted policies is also one of the lessons that can be learned from Japan's experience. The last lesson is how Japan approaches in identifying cultural barriers and using social programs along with financial and economic incentives. Numerous examples and experiences have been discussed in detail in this research.Using the demographic data available in the United Nations data banks, Statistical Center of Iran and the first-hand documents published by the Japanese government in the databases of the relevant institutions, the demographic indicators of Iran and Japan, a country which turned into a super-aged society at the fastest speed, and according to many analysts in this field, it has used a variety of effective policies to deal with this phenomenon were compare.

The present study aimed to investigate the expandability of Iranian export to Brazil using both micro and macro-level approaches. At the micro-level, Iran's export that keeps pace with the Brazilian market were identified based on relevant conventional indicators including normalized revealed comparative advantage index, Cosine index and simple estimation of trade potential. Using HS two-digit data from 2001 to 2018, it is shown that Iran has an export potential to Brazil for some commodities. The impact of major macroeconomic factors on Iran's exports to Brazil is analyzed based on the gravity model and applying the vector error correction method (VECM). In the short-run and the long-run, the results confirm that Iran’s GDP, the joint population size of the two countries, air freight cost have a positive effect while Brazil’s GDP and Linder variable harm Iran’s export to Brazil. The ratio of the official exchange rate of Iran to Brazil has a positive effect in the short-run and a negative effect in the long-run. Brazil's membership in the WTO has a significant positive effect on Iran's exports to Brazil. While the impact of financial and nonfinancial sanctions on Iran's exports to Brazil is not significant. In summary, based on the macro-level indicators, the development of trade relations is logically justified. However, trade capacity between the two countries has not been realized in the given period due to political and international circumstances (not because of the lack of economic justification).

Signing a preferential trade agreement between Iran and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) has created a suitable context for the expansion of trade interactions between the countries of this region. With respect to this context, this paper examines food trade potentials between Iran and Russia as two neighbors with significant economies. Product codes are chosen from the 21 categories of the integrated tariff system based on the global definition of food. Data analysis is based on four trade criteria including the Allen cosine measure, the Revealed Comparative Advantage measure, the simple estimate of trade potential measure, and the Drysdale index over the years 2001–2017. These indices illustrate that Iran and Russia have high trade capacities for some items in certain food groups, and that they can facilitate the process of economic integration through reinforcing regional interactions and intra-region trade expansion, while safeguarding national interests and improving national security. The paper concludes that Iran’s food exports to Russia in a particular set of commodity codes enjoy the potential of expansion due to structural similarities between the countries’ food exports, the increasing trend of Iran’s food export potential to Russia, the increasing advantage of these commodity codes in Iran’s export to the world, and the increasing trade expansion opportunities from Iran to Russia.

The cooperative approach towards trade, which is reflected in Asian International Input- Output tables, is the main factor influencing East Asian economic development. In this research, we have calculated interdependency and self- sufficiency indicators by using recently published IIO 2005. We also have used Shrestha and Hasebe (2006) results for 1990, 1995, 2000 to analyze the trends of the indicators. The results show that the interdependency has increased in the region during 1990-2005, but it has decreased in other countries in the world. The interesting result is that despite the gradual decline in self- dependency indicators of the East Asian countries during 1990-2005, they are still high in 2005. It means that the trade policy in the last three decades has been focused on importing only intermediate goods instead of final goods in order to increase the internal capacity of production. These changes have been analyzed by three phases of East Asian regionalism (Baldwin, 2008); (a) rampant unilateralism, (b) regionalism delayed, unilateralism accelerated, and (c) rampant regionalism. Due to the importance of Japan and China in the region, the trade interdependencies between countries with respect to Japan and China are also calculated separately. The results show decreasing interdependency of those countries to Japan, but increasing to China since 2000.

This study aims at comparing the economic relations of Japan with Iran and with Saudi Arabia. The comparison of these two relations is important as Iran and Saudi Arabia are leading exporters and Japan is a large importer of crude oil in the world. After a brief overview of the history of these two relations, the criteria of trade complementarity, i.e. Trade Potential Naive Assessment, Cosine Measure and Drysdale's Index are taken into account. Further, FDI in Iran and Saudi Arabia are studied based on the indicators of FDI value, FDI contribution to GDP, and the International FDI Performance Index. These indices indicate that in spite of the long aged Japan-Iran economic relations, these relations have been reduced in recent years both in trade and in foreign investment. Since, Japan needs to maintain dynamic and sustainable relations with its two main energy-providing countries; it has recently made direct investments in oil and gas extraction in Saudi Arabia in return for purchasing oil from this country. Comparatively, considering the high trading capacity between Iran and Japan, it would be time for the two countries to negotiate on the export of crude oil to Japan in return for expanding economic ties in joint ventures such as co-participating in the construction of extraction platforms and refineries in Iran, as well as gas stations in Japan and selling petroleum products on the Japanese (and East Asia) market.

Monetary and banking crisis and their heavy costs during the last three decades resulted in increasing attention to the role of institutional environment, public policy as well as regulatory governance. New research works are done to define indicators to evaluate supervisory rules and regulations in financial markets. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision- a group of representatives of bank supervisors from advanced countries-issued the Core Principles in 1997 to standardize financial market for Effective Banking Supervision. These principles are accepted by many countries in the world. In this research, we first, investigated the role of institutional environment in banking sector development encompassing 53 countries from 2000 to 2008. The results indicate that well-developed legal (public) institutions have significant effect on banking sector credit expansion. Second, we constructed regulatory indicators based on the assessment of The Basel Committee regarding accountability and independence arrangements for those 53 countries, for which the required data was available. Then, we studied the effect of those indicators on credit expansion in banking system. The results have shown the lack of a significant relationship between banking credit development and the rate of accountability and independence arrangements (as suggested by Basel Committee assessments). Although, these results confirm Ranjit Lall's findings (2009), more information is needed- at least for two periods.

The financial repression literature indicates that government interventions in the financial market, such as interest rate ceilings on bank deposits, high reserve requirements, direct intervention on bank credit allocation, and rules and regulations limiting current and capital accounts would restrict and even repress financial markets leading to negative real interest rates In this research, investigate the relationship between financial repression and economic growth using different indices for financial repression. We use a panel data encompassing 92 countries (including 33 less developed, 38 emerging market and 21 industrialized countries) over the period 1985 to 2005. We find that the negative real interest rates have negative effect on economic growth.