Evaluation of the Different Treatments and Methods of Separating Imports with Emphasis on 1381 IOT of Iran

A Compared to exports, treatment of imports with respect to nature (competitive and non-competitive), and also their classification in terms of intermediate, capital and consumption in Input-Output Table (IOT) are more complicated. Analysing these issues depend on the methods and also their assumption embodied in IOT.Considering the main feature of the constructed nine available IOTs of Iran and comparing with the experience of other countries, we observe that some of tables have neglected these issues, and the others, however, separated imports, the nature, methods and assumptions have not properly been specified. Therefore, these tables are not suitable for analysing the different aspects of imports. The specific case is the 1380 symmetric IOT of Statistical Center of Iran (SCI). This table is a commodity*commodity “mainly commodity technology assumption with adjustment on the basis of mixed technology assumption”. Besides the table lacks a separate row or colum vector of imports. To solve these issues, a new symmetric industry*industry table under industry technology assumption has been estimated. On the basis of this table, three methods of separating imports have used. The outcomes of the third method which seem very close to reality are taken for comparison with the other data of SCI and Custom. The findings reveal that the share of intermediate imports derived from the third method is close to the corresponding share of SCI and differs from the data provided by the Custom. When the shares of capital and consumption imports are compared, the differences are appeared to be considerable: the share of consumption imports derived from the third method is approximately three times more than the data given by Custom whereas the share of capital imports provided by the custom is more than two times obtained from the third method.