نشریه تحلیل های اقتصادی توسعه ایران
سال پنجم شماره 2 (پیاپی 15، تابستان 1396)

Although it appears that neoclassical economics support competitive markets, private property, and limited government and oppose socialism, in practice, however, by emphasizing on mathematical models and static equilibrium in a deterministic way, reach the same conclusion which can be achieved by socialism. In fact, both approaches instead of advocating free operation of economic agents and market process concentrate on equilibrium point and equality of price and marginal cost. Neoclassicals assume the equality of marginal cost and price unrealistic, and market socialists make such equality by giving orders to firms’ managers. The practical conclusion of both approaches is to disregard the nature of economic liberalism and role of entrepreneurship in market process. Therefore, we can conclude that neoclassical and socialist approaches oppose liberalism and economic freedom.

In the process of industrial growth and development, the electrical energy is a key input demanded by manufacturing establishments. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between electricity consumption and production volume of manufacturing establishments with 10 and more workers in Iran. In this regard, we apply the Dynamic Panel Data and GMM estimation method during the period 1995-2014. Hence, we use data on 15 manufacturing establishments in two-digit ISIC codes. The results show that: (1) the effects of all regressors including the number of workers, the gross fixed capital formation and electricity consumption on the production of manufacturing establishments are positive and significant; (2) the coefficient for the number of workers is greater than those of the other two variables, which indicates that the establishments under study are labor-intensive; (3) the short-run and long-run elasticities of electricity consumption are 0.17 and 0.30, respectively, indicating that a 1% increase in electricity consumption across manufacturing establishments increases the production volume in the short and long-run by 0.17% and 0.30%, respectively.

Guarantee of property rights increases economic freedom. This paper aims to examine the relationship between economic development and property rights. Achieving development requires paying attention to restoration and preparation of necessary substrates including judicial and economic systems. This research is descriptive and uses correlation analysis. It predicts the effect of property rights’ index on economic development in Iran during 2008-2016. The statistical data are extracted from the International Property Rights Organization and the World Bank. To test the prediction power, Bayesian networks, and neural networks based on perceptron and artificial intelligence have been used. The fitting of research model indicates the relationship between economic development and property rights. In addition, the sensitivity analysis shows that legal and political environment, physical property rights and intellectual property rights have the greatest impact on economic development, respectively.

The Walrasian equilibrium model (including the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model) has been criticized for over-simplification and lack of empirical power. The most important problem with this approach is to model the relationship between micro and macro structure. The economic system is dynamic, adaptive, evolving and complex. Therefore, another approach is needed to model the behavior of this system. With increase in the processing power of computers, it was possible to use agent-based computational methods to study complex economic phenomena and processes. In this approach, there are no limiting and simplistic assumptions existing in the Walrasian approach. This approach addresses the computational study of dynamic and complex economic systems in which heterogeneous agents have interactions with each other. It is a combination of evolutionary economics, cognitive psychology and computer science. Unlike conventional macroeconomics, agent-based macro models are built from bottom to up. Over the past decade, this approach has played a major role in analyzing macroeconomic and policy issues. It is one of the main methods of behavioral economics modeling. Due to high flexibility, agent-based macroeconomics have many applications in various branches of economics, including modeling of electricity markets, the development of institutions and social norms, financial economics, industrial organization, and labor market. In this paper, features, conceptual foundations, modeling components and the advantages and disadvantages of this approach are discussed

Investment is one of the pillars of each economy. Undoubtedly, increase in production is the first step in economic development, which requires higher investment. Hence, some economic theories refer to lack of capital as main cause of underdevelopment. The present paper examines the factors influencing capital accumulation in Iran using time series data over the period 1974-2004. It applies an auto-regressive distributed lags model and Johansen- Juselius test to examine long-run relationship. The findings indicate that capital accumulation is affected by tax revenues, public and private savings, interest rate, and net current and capital accounts.Capital accumulation is directly related to tax revenues, public and private savings, and net capital account, but indirectly to the domestic interest rate.Therefore, a proper financial policy can be effective in achieving the goal of more capital accumulation.

Political business cycle theory investigates the interaction between voters and the government. According to this theory, economic factors have significant influence on voters’ behavior. Hence, governments try to adopt different economic policies to meet voters’ satisfaction. This paper attempts to estimate an ARMA model for political business cycles in Iran during the period of 1978-2016. The results indicate that inflation fluctuates during the elections. Inflation drops in the election year and rises in the post-election periods. In addition, the budget deficit increases and capital investment decreases over the pre-election periods. The ARMA model was insignificant for post-election periods. The results of the monetary variables (liquidity and net government debt to the central bank) show that the behavior of these variables confirms the existence of a political business cycle. In election years and the pre-election year relative to other years, net government debt to the central bank increases by 3% on average. This results in higher liquidity in the next period. Finally the unemployment rate is not influenced by the political business cycle.