Investigating the Impact of Human Development Index on B2B E-Commerce Expansion: A Case Study of Iran and Iran's Major Business Partners with Threshold Regression Perspective

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of the human development index on the expansion of B2B electronic commerce (business-to-business electronic commerce) in Iran and Iran's trading partner countries during the period of 2011-2016 using the Astana panel approach.The research variables include the level of expansion of e-commerce, imposed pressure due to dependence on exports, normative pressure due to consistent global trade relations, imitative pressure due to foreign competition, global common knowledge, Internet access and human development index.According to the results, in countries with a low human development index, this index has a negative effect on the development of B2B e-commerce, which can be affected by the lack of infrastructure, and this relationship is inverse for countries with a high level of human development. Based on the threshold defined in this article, the average in countries with a lower human development index, the human development index in these countries causes a decrease in the level of B2B e-commerce, but in countries where the HDI is higher than the threshold, it did not have a significant effect. The human development index regime has had a negative effect on B2B e-commerce up to a threshold level with a coefficient of 3.667 and has reduced the human development index of e-commerce. India,Pakistan and Tajikistan are less than the threshold value of 0.653, and the rest of the countries studied in this research are more than the threshold value. The threshold effect test was performed, both based on the 95% confidence interval, the numerical value of the threshold is placed between the highest and the lowest value, and based on the critical value, andthe significance levelof theH0 hypothesis that there is no threshold effect is rejected, and theH1 hypothesis ofthe existence of a minimum A threshold is not crossed.