مجله اقتصاد محیط زیست و منابع طبیعی
پیاپی 2 (زمستان 1395)

The purpose of this study was to estimate the value of recreation and conservation garden flowers at Chamran Park in the city of Karaj.  For this purpose, 125 questionnaires were collected in 2013 from visitors to the garden have been analyzed. The analysis of collected data indicate that 79 percent of respondents to the conservation garden and 89 percent were willing to pay for entertainment value. The results indicate that the maximum willingness to pay per person for the conservation and recreational value respectively is estimated 19778.5 and 4834.9 Rials. According to the results the most important factors affecting willingness to pay for preservation value bidder are income, occupation and attitude and willingness to pay for recreational value bidder, education and attitude. In this regard, it is suggested that the officials of garden flowers, to create two choices dues and fees for citizens to apply for entry to the garden.

In the present study, the cross sectional data of 2013-14 were collected through questionnaires from 201 irrigated-wheat producers in Fasa applying multistage random cluster sampling to investigate the effects of energy carriers’ price rising on environmental quality. Firstly, through utilizing Almost Ideal Supply System and estimating the demands of wheat inputs and the complementary and substitutionary relationships between the inputs. Then, consistence with targeted subsidies plan, various energy (gas oil and electricity) prices increase scenarios are employed to calculate changes in the demand for production inputs. In this study, changes in quantity demand inputs for water, chemical pesticides, fertilizers and energy carriers’ has been used as an indicator of environmental quality. The results indicated that own-price elasticity of compensated demand are negative for all inputs. Also the cross elasticities of compensated coefficients revealed complementary relationships between gas, oil, machinery and electricity, labor, and the substitutionary relationship between gas oil and electricity and as  well as gas oil and labor. The effects of the price rising of gas oil and electricity indicated that by increasing in price these carriers, the environmental quality reduced. Therefore, it is suggested that policy in wheat production should be implemented with further considerations. Finally, despite its low own-price and cross elasticities of compensated demand inputs, the substitutionary they can implicitly suggests appropriately willingness of producers to use inputs other instead of energy. Therefore, it is suggested that the government should introduce technologies replacing energies and promote consistent environmental instead.

The process of economy development and economy policies cause environmental challenges as the major concern of policy makers in recent decades. Therefore, the investigation of the impact of government economy policies on environment would be necessary and important. The aim of this study is to assess the impact of environmental pollutants (air pollutants) on hygiene expenditures in Iran. The specified pattern of Grossman et. al. and Franklin et al was applied as the model for this study and in order to analysis the data “Panel Data” method is used employing “Eviews 9” software. The result of Dickey-Fuller unit root and Fisher test revealed the integration between variables. The result of Hausman test verified the fixed effects model to estimate long-term relationship. The measure of impact of industrial pollutant’s diffusion (carbon dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and sulfur dioxide) is equal to 0.012 and has direct relationship with health expenditure. The share of fossils fuels in greenhouse gases ‘emission in different sectors was equal to 0.056 and had a positive effect, and the R&D costs’ logarithm was equal to –0.12 that it can be possible to find a way to reduce the pollution by increasing research and development’s budget and also the damaging effect of industrial and commercial pollution could be significantly reduced by transferring technology and new innovations. Additionally, the intercept of the model revealed the amount of negative effect related to the different industrial sector individually which the industrial sector with 0.39 obtained the highest score while business and household sectors had the least impact on the infection’s rate.

This paper extends recently developed parametric hyperbolic distance function to the analysis of environmental technical efficiency for a panel data of 30 provinces in Iran from 2006 -2011.The results show that average of environmental technical efficiency in Iran, from 2006-2011, has been 0.6961. So that, real GDP increased by an average of 43.66 percent and the simultaneous reduction CO2 emissions to 39.30 percent, without any change in inputs and only using current technology, resulting in improved performance production country and achieve efficiency. The results show that, for most provinces, the technical environmental efficiency has been on the decline over time, and has been a downward trend. Among the provinces, Tehran has the least and Sistan - Baluchestan has the highest environmental technical efficiency. Finally, with measurement of environmental technical efficiency provinces can be paid for to provide separate targets. So that for the provinces with lower energy efficiency will have the greater potential for reducing energy consumption and emissions, compared with other provinces based on  separate goals.

In the early 1970s, the Iranian government was committed to maintain a healthy environment in the country. While it was clear that the government would not sacrifice economic growth in order to preserve and protect the environment, several changes had been made in the Iranian Constitution aiming to achieve environmental improvement. In particular, the goal was to ensure the environmental activities become a major part of national development plans. There are evidences that show that the government has not been successful in tackling environmental challenges. The perceived severity of environmental degradation was positively related to the weakness of executive authority, the lack of administrative efficiency and the absence of a detailed program of action. These facts raise important questions: First, Whether society is willing to dedicate efforts to protect the environment. Second, whether the government makes enough efforts to prevent environmental degradation. Answering these questions leads to implications for environmental policy making.

In order to meet the growing demand and the reduction of the growing gap between supply and demand for water, the desalination processes can be one of the effective options. One of the main technologies for water production is the desalination of sea water all around the world. The current research has been conducted in 2014 aiming to evaluate the economic feasibility of desalination of Persian Gulf’s water in terms of new energies and fossil energy and the model of life cycle cost has been used. The results indicate that the use of diesel energy, in other words, other fossil fuels compared with new solar- energy, for desalination process, is not more feasible from the economic perspective. Net present value in private discount rate with loan scenarios with solar energy is equal to 4776.30 million rials that is economically justified And with diesel fuel scenarios equal to -2970.64 million rials without economic justification .Sensitivity of desalination project of fossil fuels in comparison with the selling price of fresh water is too little, and this result in the use of solar energy is facing with an increasing trend, but the sensitivity of desalination projects of new energies compared to the selling price of fresh water is high, because the amount of variations is very high. Also the average cost obtained for both diesel and solar energy regarding the price of fresh water, in the state of solar energy is far less than fossil fuel. And finally, from the two of these projects the use of solar energy is more feasible and economical.