Cement Market Regulation in the Year 2008 (Case study: IRAN)

The economic growth of the country is a continuous process and with it comes feeding the basic necessities like housing and infrastructure, so cement growth follows economic growth and sometimes accelerates it. But cement industry is highly dependent on emissions-intensive energy sources and also is a capital intensive industry. Hence, characterizing the effective economic factors on cement demand and forecasting cement consumption for strategic planning guidance is useful. This article attempts to forecast cement consumption by methods of components market and inference of demand function (using autoregressive distributed lag model), for the year 2008. The results with regard to the past years -that country's cement consumption was restricted by supply- show cement demand in Iran is a function of cement price, government infrastructure expenditures and value added of building sector. Accordingly, the government has an effective role in regulating the cement market and its fluctuations, by setting price, allocating development funds to expand production capacity of the economy, reforming culture of consumption and helping the export marketing.