Study of the effective indices on wooden furniture imports in Iran

During the recent years due to the innovative trends taking place in the production, packaging and shipping of furniture, world trade of the products has increased drastically. This issue together with some given weaknesses in manufacturing and marketing domestic wooden has resulted in significant growth in furniture imports to Iran. To achieve efficient and economic imports, it is critical to understand market preferences and factors involved in selecting foreign goods for domestic products. In order to investigate the reasons for the expansion of the import quantities, the standardized questionnaires (certified by professionals and academic staff in four groups: Economics, Environmental, Technical and Technological, and Consumption) are provided using documentary and survey methods to investigate effective indices on importing wooden furniture to Iran and the reasons behind. These main indices of imports are rated by three

Likert spectrum, Duncan Test, and relative importance ratio of each index. We applied Likert spectrum on the whole statistical population and results indicated that Environment index ranked first followed by Consumption, Technical and Technological, and Economics indexes, respectively. Duncan test shows Economics index has the first rank, Environment index holds the second place. Technical and Technological index are in the same place as Consumption index and according to the test there is no significant differences between them. On the other hand, using the relative importance ratio method we classified related occupations into 4 groups: producers, vendors/ distributers, importers, and consumers. We employed third method to see how these four groups evaluate the importance of each index. Results are as follows: Producers believe that Environment index is in the first place and then Economics, Technical and Technological, and finally Consumption index. Vendors/Distributors believe Consumption, Technical and Technological, Economics, and Environment index is the sequence. Importers believe that Consumption index is in the main priority and then Technical and Technological, Economics, and Environment hold next places.