نشریه اقتصاد دفاع و توسعه پایدار
پیاپی 9 (پاییز 1397)

Iran’s Armed Forces has a significant share of the budget resources. Due to Iran's strategic situation in the Middle East region increasing the level of armed forces expenditures is inevitable. Therefore the resources allocated to the military and defense sector must be properly managed and a model must be devised to finance military expenditures in order to minimize the dependence of the military and armed forces on the annual public budget. Using the experiences of other countries and comparative comparisons of these countries, as well as the views of experts this study aims to develop the optimal and appropriate financing models for Iran and validate them using multi-criteria decision making and Delphi techniques. Results show that there are generally three state-based, public-private partnership and outsourcing and privatization approaches to financing the armed forces. According to the results, participation in the development and improvement in the utilization of military facilities and assets, outsourcing of construction projects, changing the application of assets and facilities and creating new capabilities in facilities, establishing an “armed forces financing fund”, developing international partnership contracts in producing military equipment and the opening of a foreign exchange account to finance the import of military weapons are the most favorable methods of financing the armed forces.

The dependency of the payment systems on use of international currencies such as dollar in Iran's cross-border trade has led to a growing vulnerability of the Iranian economy against economic sanctions. Accordingly, aware of this, the United States has attempted to impose financial sanctions which have severely disrupted Iran's international financial transactions. Meanwhile, in light of reducing the negative impact of financial sanctions, Bilateral Currency Swap Agreements (hereinafter BCSAs) are intended to facilitate the flow of payments in cross-border trade between countries by eliminating the use of international currencies. With regard to a distinction between money functions, the aforesaid agreements merely use international currencies as a basis for accounting in BCSAs and therefore, make payments to national currencies. The establishment and implementation of these agreements would ideally result in strengthening the position of the national currency in international economic relations and reducing the negative impacts of economic sanctions. Indeed, the agreements necessitate certain prerequisites to be followed; otherwise it would lead to weakening domestic industries and depreciating the Central Bank reserves. In the present article, through scrutinizing of the foregoing, we aim to provide a functional perspective of the establishment and implementation of BCSAs under economic sanctions.

The rapid aging of Iran’s population and its low economic growth is a major concern for Pension Funds with the DB-PAYG defined benefit-cost plan. While many countries have undertaken parametric reforms to mitigate the impact of this process in order to maintain the financial sustainability of the Fund, others have attempted to solve this problem through systematic reforms: implementation of new Defined Contributions (DCs) and Notional Defined Contributions (NDC). This article, while studying the current system of the armed forces pension fund, introduces a new retirement system for notional personal accounts and examines the long-term financial sustainability of both the DB-PAYG and NDC systems. The Monte Carlo method is used to simulate retirement systems. Simulation results show that the proposed system can mitigate the effects of economic and demographic changes and reduce the armed forces pension fund commitments by at least one-third. Applying this system requires capital or government budget inflows or decreasing the increasing rate of pension salaries which will result in pensioners’ welfare reduction.

One of the topics that deals with the development and enhancement of investment efficiency is feasibility study. Ministry of Defense products in both defensive and non-defensive categories have a wide variety and scope of development. Therefore, studying the feasibility of non-defensive projects of Ministry of Defense is of high importance. This study aims to identify the barriers and problems of feasibility study in the Ministry of Defense and to analyze the relationship between these factors. In this regard, two methods of Qualitative Content Analysis and Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) with interview and questionnaire tools have been utilized. We have used the snowball method of data collection. The statistical population was 16 interviews with the last 3 interviews showing theoretical saturation. The results show that in the defense area there are 11 barriers doing the feasibility study that include managerial problems, maximum effectiveness, lack of attention to cost allocation for FS, and rush in performing the feasibility study with the most impact. It is also concluded that factors such as government laws and regulations and international environment problems has had the least impact on the feasibility study of Defense Department non-defense plans.

The set of measures taken by world powers to punish or compel countries to do or not to do what they want is called sanctions. For the past 40 years Iran has been the target of toughest sanctions. The purpose of this article is to examine and identify the economic challenges after the imposition of cruel sanctions in banking sector. For this purpose, after reviewing the theoretical basics and interviewing some industry experts, 13 main challenges were identified and a researcher-made questionnaire was developed. Ten experienced banking executives, managers and experts answered the researcher's questions and prioritized the indicators using the combined Permutation and Genetic Algorithm coding approach in MATLAB 17 software. The number of replications, population rate and intersection rate were respectively 1000, 5000 and 3%. The results show that the lack of information transparency in commercial, monetary and currency areas, lack of experience of the banking system in the field of new monetary and financial instruments, and the dominance of government fiscal policies over its monetary policy are among the most important challenges of the banking industry after sanctions. At the end some suggestions were provided.

The development of entrepreneurial activities, which is always associated with high risk, plays a key and important role in orienting economies. Entrepreneurs are the catalysts for growth and innovation in the small and large industries and create many job opportunities. Today, the most important bottleneck for the quantitative and qualitative development of the knowledge-based businesses, which according to the supreme leader of the Islamic Revolution, is in line with the policies of the resistive economy and the fight against economic warfare, is an effective and efficient financing mechanism. According to experts in the field, current support is both inadequate and inefficient. The purpose of this research is to present a model of how to use and develop Venture Capital Funds in Iranian economy in line with resistive economy and combating in the economic war. This is a qualitative, consequential, and applied research. In the research methodology section, a combination of library studies, interview and Delphi methods is used. Eight essential and influential variables on the development of the environment governing high risk investments were identified and prioritized using Hierarchical Analysis (AHP). The innovation of this study, compared to a few previous studies, is to focus carefully on the whole environment governing venture capital ecosystem rather than single-loop analysis. Finally, by presenting the suggested solutions for each of the fundamental variables, a comparative-practical model for applying and developing venture capital funds in accordance with the current conditions of the Iranian economy is presented.