فصلنامه پژوهشهای اقتصادی (رشد و توسعه پایدار)
سال شانزدهم شماره 4 (زمستان 1395)

According to the Holy Islam, there are mutual relationships between citizens and the state in an Islamic society; which imply complement duties for both sides. The Sharia has defined different responsibilities for the citizens, which in accordance with the Islamic state will result in a better society. Among these responsibilities is the reaction of a Muslim when witnessing a crime in the society. By using the game theory approach we have studied the consequences of two Islamic orders, i.e. enjoining right and forbidding wrong. We have modeled the reactions of the people when seeing a crime in the society in the framework of a strategic game with VNM preferences. The results show that not paying enough attention to these two valuable orders would reduce the individual and social utility. In other words, if people follow the enjoining right and forbidding wrong, the economic and social costs of crime for the society will decrease and the social welfare will increase.

In most countries, there is no panel data for different households over time. However, cross-sectional data are usually available. Using a cross-sectional dataset, a given group of households cannot be examined for subsequent years. To solve this problem, we used data from the pseudo-panels. The pseudo-panel approach provides cohort generations of households over time. This method enables us to track the performance of each cohort over time. Here, we study the absolute mobility in Iran with 23 periods and 20 generations. Income mobility is an index which indicates the degree of inequality of opportunities in a society. It is measured as either conditional or absolute one. In conditional mobility, fixed effects are considered, however in absolute mobility it is not so.The fixed effects indicate heterogeneity among individuals. Our results indicate that the absolute income mobility is low and Inequality of opportunity is decreasing over time. But the speed of decrease in inequality is low.

Banks as economic firms try to provide banking services in low cost. The efficiency of banking system and its convergence among the Iranian banks is a top priority for planners and decision-makers. In this research, the data of 9 Iranian banks (6 commercial and 3 specialized) during 2001-2012 period are utilized according to intermediate approach and Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) within a translog cost function and Model I of Battese and Colli (1992). The results show that average efficiency for commercial and specialized banks has been 78.95% and 87.58%, respectively, which imply that the average efficiency of specialized banks is more than that of commercial banks. In addition, the convergence process has been studied as a result of economic growth models. The speed of efficiency convergence has been estimated by -571% in absolute model, and -576% in conditional model, respectively. The average efficiency growth is decreasing and the efficiency adjustment speed is convergent.

The government of Iran has faced with budget deficits during 1979 – 2010, which has been financed mainly through money creation. Theoretically, the impacts of budget deficit and inflationary tax on macroeconomy are very controversial, so that both decrease and increase in consumption, investment, net exports and total expenditure have been supported by empirical researches. Using structural cointegrating vector autoregressive, this paper investigates the impacts of inflationary finance on the demand side of Iran’s economy during mentioned period. Budget deficit is defined as the difference between operating budget deficit (minus net operating balance) and capital balance surplus, or net lending (net acquisition of nonfinancial assets). The results show that both operating budget deficit and net lending have positive impacts on consumption, investment and net imports in the short run. So changes in the demand side have not necessarily same orientation with increase or decrease in budget deficits, but the source of change in budget deficit determines its effects. Reducing budget deficits through positive shock to net lending and a policy of increasing operating budget deficit have similar effects. Furthermore, the results show that the operating budget deficit has no effect on demand components in the long run. The complementarity of inflationary tax and financial repression is confirmed in both short run and long run. In addition, the results indicate that an increase in operating budget deficit and/or net lending induce more inflationary tax and financial repression. Although the budget deficit has no effect on demand side in the long run, but its two outcomes -inflationary tax and financial repression- have opposite effects on the consumption, investment and net imports in both short run and long run.

With the expansion of government intervention in the economy, the investigation of relationship between government size and macroeconomic variables attracts more attention of economists, policymakers, and researchers. In the present study, the size of government and its correlation with trade openness are examined across developing Muslim countries (D-8) and OECD using panel data model during 2000-2012. The trade intensity index is used as one of the subcategories of trade openness. According to the results of unit root tests, which imply non-stationery series, co-integration test is run in order to assure a long-term relationship among variables. The regression model is estimated in fixed effects format using weighted least squares (WLS). The results indicate a significant and positive impact of the government size on the openness ratio by 12% for D-8 countries, however the relationship is not significant for OECD at the 5% level of significance. The relationship between government size and country size (total population) is positive for two groups. The findings imply that making different policies to remove trade barriers may result in strengthening good governance indicators.

The main aim in this paper is to test the nonlinearity relationship between inflation and the government size in Iran during 1974-2012. To this end, we use a threshold regression approach and the Hansen nonlinearity test. The result indicates nonlinear relationship between inflation and government size. According to the results, an increase in government size by 0.22 will increase the rate of inflation with decreasing gradient, but afterwards any increase in government size will increase the rate of inflation. In other words, under a small government regime, government size has negative effect on inflation, but in a large government regime, it has positive effect on inflation.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the performance of budget designers in forecasting government revenues in the Iranian economy. For this purpose, three methods, including analysis with statistical indicators, equation of error component separation, and macroeconomic regression model have been used in order to analyze the prediction errors in tax, oil and gas revenues, and income from property and sale of public goods and services during 1973-2011. The results show that forecasts of all government revenues by budget designers were optimistic (over-estimated), on average, and the highest forecasting errors belonged to revenues from government ownership. The results of the second method show that the forecasting errors in four kinds of government revenues have been mainly nonsystematic and influenced by exogenous shocks and factors. Furthermore, the results of the third method, in which the factors affecting prediction of government revenue were evaluated using the seemingly unrelated regression equations (SURE), show that the non-oil GDP and the exchange rate had significant effects on the forecast of all government revenues. However, inflation and unemployment rates were effective only in predicting tax revenue and income from the sale of goods and services.

Postulating perfect rationality and full information paves the way for neoclassic economics to explain the process of decision making through equalizing marginal units of variables based on optimizing the behavior of economic agents. This axiomatic approach results in eliminating any uncertainty from the analyses. This problem causes the marginal economics to neglect the issue of institutions. Moralities as a part of social institutions consist of specific rules and regulations, which have large effects on transactions and choices of economic agents, and determine the level of efficiency. This paper tries to develop a theoretical model for explaining the behavior of the economic agents of an Islamic society, which consists of specific and unique institutions. This research hypothesizes that morals in light of belief in the Hereafter eliminate the uncertainty of lack of experiencing the Hereafter and make optimization of economic agents possible. Two issues occur in a society in which the belief in the life after death is mixed with moralities. This paper tackles these two issues. The first one is the inter-world discount rate and the second is the marginal discounted cost (benefit) to the accumulated cost (benefit) ratio which is used as an index by economic agents in decision making process. The result implies that equilibrium condition is not efficient in orthodox economics regarding eternal reward and punishment system and its norms, and requires revision.

Societies and governments have considered tax as one of the most important ways of public financing. Moreover, identifying new tax capacity to improve tax status and to increase tax incomes is assumed substantial. On the other hand, most economists believe that economic status of a country is affected not only by the economic performance of region but also by the adjacent zones. Therefore, ignoring such spatial factors and linkages may negatively affect the performance of that region. Accordingly, convergence and the related subjects are increasingly drawing the attention of more economists. The present study tries to examine the tax capacity convergence among Iran's provinces during 2001-2011 using Spatial Econometrics in MATLAB software. The findings indicate that meaningful and negative coefficient of the lagged dependent variable represents the convergence of the tax to value added (VA) ratio to its long-term path.

Examining the strategies related to the promotion of human resource productivity, and quality level of laborers using wage payment is considered as the most important factor responsible for quantitative as well as qualitative economic growth of the society. Obviously, if the employees working in any part of the economic sector have high productivity, the overall performance of that sector will be improved in accordance with productivity. The aim of this study is to find out whether any increment in wage payments of the laborers as an effective measure can cause a substantial increase in the labor productivity and value added in industrial cooperatives. In order to study the effects of compensatory earnings by the employees on their productivity, the Cobb-Douglas model and panel data regression were used to analyze productivity performance of laborers working in industrial cooperatives across 30 provinces during the period 2006-2011. Moreover, the regression analysis on panel data of these cooperatives was applied to examine which section of compensatory payments, i.e., wage or other payments, has the highest effect on labor productivity. The results show that the variable of compensatory payments is of significant and positive effect on value added of industrial cooperatives in Iran. However, the direct wages have higher impact than other payments on labor productivity.