Iran's Operation in Ethical Markets; An Evaluation

Production process in Iran, as in the other developing countries, involves exploiting and, at the same time, destroying the environment. Since the environmental and social problems increase in the course of development, and they are not simply solvable by law and market mechanism, observing ethics and existence of ethical markets are necessary in order for these problems to be solved. Ethical market is the place for supplying and demanding goods and services that have environmental benefits and are standard so long as the social issues are concerned. In the present article, we introduce different indexes for identifying ethical markets, and compare, in this regard, Iran with the countries mentioned in the Iran’s 20-Year Vision Plan and also with selected developed countries in 2012. Thereafter, using the software SAS and adopting principal component analysis method, we introduce a general index for ethical markets and compare Iran’s position with that of Vision Plan countries and a set of selected developed and developing countries. The results show that the environment operation index has the greatest effect on the general index of ethical markets, and good governance index takes second place. The selected countries, excluding China, are the top ranked ones in the table, and, between the Vision Plan countries, Georgia ranks first. Iran, with respect to the indexes of ethical markets, ranks low.