مجله بررسی مسائل اقتصاد ایران
سال یازدهم شماره 1 (پیاپی 21، بهار و تابستان 1403)

The informal economy plays a significant role in economies, influencing their overall performance and stability. Reducing the negative effects of the informal economy requires a balanced combination of policies. Monetary policy, along with its transmission channels, directly and indirectly, have positive or negative consequences on the activities of both formal and informal economies. In this study, it is investigated the effect of various monetary policy tools, including interest rates, bank credit ratio, and exchange rate changes, on the size of the informal economy in Iran. An asymmetric Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model is used to analyze the relationship between these variables during the period of 2017-2018. The results indicate the negative effect of the monetary policy credit channel on the informal economy. Additionally, the exchange rate channel shows a positive effect, while the interest rate channel has a negative effect on the informal economy, and these coefficients are asymmetric. The coefficients of inflation rate and the ratio of liquidity to GDP also show a positive effect. Therefore, policymakers can utilize monetary policies to control the informal economy by implementing measures such as increasing the granting of bank credits, controlling inflation, and managing the exchange rate.

Have nominal and real fiscal drags occurred in Iran’s economy? Answering this question requires estimating the effect of real economic growth and inflation on government tax revenues relative to GDP. Using the Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares (DOLS), this paper tests the occurrence of fiscal nominal and real drag/anti-drag in Iran's economy from 1972 to 2020. The results indicate that the effect of growth and inflation on the relative tax revenue has become negative and positive, respectively. This means that both real fiscal anti-drag and nominal fiscal drag have simultaneously occurred in Iran, which documents the implicit practices of over-indexing. Moreover, the more Iran's economy becomes open, the more fiscal affairs become decentralized - especially taxation-, and the more the government becomes compliant with relative market prices in the supply of public goods, the more the drag effect of taxation will significantly reduce. Overall, these findings support the idea of designing a coherent economic growth strategy in conjunction with the establishment of an advanced progressive tax system based on comprehensive income taxation that properly addresses the various dimensions of full-indexation, extroversion, decentralization, tax efficiency, and monetarism - adjustment of prices towards the market prices.

The present study aims to identify the influencing variables and investigate their effect on the price of sunflower oil in Iran and out-of-sample forecast (2023:10-2024:09) using the vector autoregression method. First, due to the cointegration of the research variables, we used the Johansen-Juselius cointegration test to confirm the long-term relationship between the variables. Then, the long-term and short-term models were estimated, and the error correction coefficient was obtained at -0.3147. Next, we investigated impulse response functions. According to the results of impulse response functions, shocks in the price of the substitute product, the government exchange rate, and the global oil price index (with 16, 10, and 9.6 percent in standard form, respectively) have been more effective than other variables on the fluctuations of the sunflower oil price. Also, the variance decomposition showed the global oil price index variable explains the changes in the dependent variable more than other variables. Finally, we estimated out-of-sample forecasts. Based on the forecast evaluation criteria, the model can accurately forecast the price trend of sunflower oil. Also, according to our findings recommended removing obstacles to production, formulating and implementing incentive packages for producers, and reviewing the regulations for importing goods into the country to control the price of sunflower oil.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the factors of differences in employment in two regions including Sistan ‎and Baluchestan province and the average of the country and to decompose it into four factors including ‎differences in direct coefficients, sectoral technology structure, final demand level and composition or structure of ‎final demand. For this purpose, the spatial structural decomposition technique has been used in the input-output ‎model between two regions. The results of this study showed that the difference in the composition of the final ‎demand in Sistan and Baluchestan province compared to the country's average has caused the employment of ‎‎50674 people in the province to be higher than the country's average, but the low level of final demand compared ‎to the country's average, has caused the employment of the province to be low by 687993 people compared to the ‎country's average. Also, the higher direct employment coefficients in the province compared to the average of the ‎country has caused the higher employment of the province by 539,805 people. Finally, the difference in the ‎structure of technology or inter-sectoral relations has caused the low employment of 51521 people in the province ‎compared to the average of the country.

Demographic information plays an effective role in determining the amount of demand for leisure time; For this reason, entertainment marketing institutions should invest and design leisure packages based on the demand function of leisure time while knowing the demographic data. The purpose of this article is to estimate the leisure time demand function of residents in urban areas of Iran based on factors affecting the amount of leisure time. In this way, the effect of the effective factors on the leisure time of Iranians living in urban areas based on age, educational qualification, activity-occupation status and the coefficients of the multiple regression model in the statistical year 2018-2019 were estimated using SPSS software. The estimation results indicate that age and educational qualification have a significant positive relationship with the leisure time of residents of urban areas, however, with the increase in the role and economic activity, less time is devoted to leisure time. Men's less free time than women and the effect of facilities such as housing and cars in allocating more time to free time are other findings of the research.

Water resources are an important issue worldwide and play a fundamental role in the ecosystem. Water is a strategic economic resource that can bring systemic and long-term stability to the national economy and social development. In recent years, water shortages in many Iranian cities have become a significant problem that may threaten Iran's sustainable economic development. However, despite the importance of water, it has so far been neglected in the analysis of economic growth in the provinces of Iran. In this regard, the purpose of this study is to investigate the role of water in economic growth and, at the same time, the role of economic growth in water usage in the provinces of Iran, considering the importance of water resources in the country's economic growth. For this purpose, data from 28 provinces of the country during the period 2006 to 2018 and simultaneous equation system has been used. The results of the study indicate that GDP also has a significant and positive impact on water consumption. It should be noted that the Kuznets Environmental Curve, which examines the relationship between growth and water consumption in 28 provinces of Iran during the study period, has not been confirmed.

The influence of the type of political structure on the emergence of the resource curse is one of the most important topics that have been discussed about this phenomenon. Most researches have concluded that democracy can prevent the emergence of the resource curse, and vice versa, dictatorial and autocratic systems provide the conditions for the emergence of the resource curse. Of course, the reverse of this relationship has also been discussed, that is, the curse of resources can be an obstacle to democracy and instead a source of dictatorship. Oil revenues in particular and natural resources in general have changed and complicated the institutional relations between the state and the society. The interaction between state and society in oil countries is fluctuating between tyranny and oil democracy. Using two methods of stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and game theory, the present research shows how natural resource revenues interact with political stability and the voice and accountability, and influence inefficiency and minimize the possibilities of realizing democracy in these countries. Based on this, the oil countries must simultaneously reduce their dependence on oil revenues and, on the other hand, improve structural and institutional reforms.

Monetary policies affect macroeconomic variables and financial indexes through changes in importance parameters of macroeconomic. Therefore, it is necessary to test the effects of changes in these parameters in a simulation environment. In present paper, the effect of monetary policies on Iran’s financial market has been simulated with a system dynamics model and using data from 2011 to 2021 (and simulated until 2031). The results showed that some monetary policy variables, such as the increase in interest rate, have an effect on the distribution of financial assets between the bank, the stock market, and non-productive assets, and reduce the capital market size, and others, such as increasing in bank credit, foreign asset in central bank and government debts will increase all financial markets. The increase in the bank interest rate, despite the increase in deposits in the bank, will reduce investment in the stock market and increase the trend towards non-productive assets such as dollars and gold. Also, government financing through borrowing from the central bank increases propensity to non-productive assets and increases the inflationary cycle.

Industrial metals, particularly copper, zinc, lead, and nickel, play a pivotal role not only in determining the pricing of manufactured goods but also in ensuring the economic security of nations. Analyzing the return interconnections of these metals under varying market conditions is crucial. This study employs the Time-Varying Parameter Vector Autoregression (TVP-VAR) model over January 1990 to May 2024 to examine the price fluctuations of these metals, which are essential inputs for Shahid Bahonar Copper Industries. The results indicate that zinc and lead are the primary risk transmitters in normal and bullish markets, whereas in bearish markets, zinc acts as the main transmitter and nickel as the primary receiver of volatility. Additionally, significant asymmetries in volatility transmission are observed between these metals during bullish and bearish conditions, with more pronounced effects during events such as the 2008 financial crisis (for copper and zinc) and the Russia-Ukraine war (for zinc and lead). This research offers practical insights for industry managers, enabling them to determine optimal timing for purchasing raw materials and selling products based on the co-movement or divergence of metal prices. The proposed strategies focus on minimizing costs, providing a comprehensive framework for managing volatility in metal markets.

Due to the need to understand how oil income uncertainty affects macroeconomic variables, in this study, the asymmetric effect of oil export on GDP, unemployment and income distribution in Iran was investigated. For this purpose, required data were collected from central bank during 1990-2022 and analyzed with generalized moments model (GMM). Results showed that oil export has an asymmetric effect on GDP, unemployment rate and Gini coefficient. Also, the positive momentum of oil exports has strong positive significant effect on GDP, weak positive significant effect on unemployment rate, and strong positive significant effect on the Gini coefficient. Since the results of the research showed that the positive impulse of oil export has a significant positive effect on the unemployment rate, it is suggested to the economic policy makers to prevent its adverse effects on employment with a coherent program and with supportive packages, reduce the welfare of the newly unemployed. Finally, since the positive momentum of oil exports on the one hand has a significant positive effect on the gross domestic product and on the other hand it increases income inequality, "growth with redistribution" and "growth with greater equality" should be on the agenda of the country's planners.

According to Iran's Seventh Development Plan, one of Iran's specialized banks is mandated to transform into the Islamic Republic of Iran Development Bank by the end of 2024. Given its pivotal role in channeling financial resources toward development projects, selecting the appropriate bank is paramount. This study utilizes the CAMELS financial soundness indicators and a combined Shannon entropy and grey relational analysis (GRA) model to rank Iran's specialized banks. The objective is to identify the least financially sound bank as the optimal candidate for transformation, thereby suggesting a suitable host bank and mitigating sector imbalances by eliminating the underperforming institution. The ranking reveals a close competition between Bank Maskan and Tose’e Ta’avon Bank, complicating the final decision. Therefore, it is recommended that factors beyond Indicators examined, such as ownership structure, commitment levels, and resource mobilization capacity, be considered for a more precise selection of the Islamic Republic of Iran Development Bank.

Given two fundamental problems of the Iranian economy in recent decades, namely structural budget deficits and low economic growth, this study investigates the nonlinear effect of the size of the government budget deficit (government budget deficit as a percentage of GDP) on Iran's economic growth using the Threshold Autoregressive (TAR) model. The findings of this study show that the size of the budget deficit, in a two-regime structure with a threshold value of 4.28%, has affected Iran's economic growth during the period 1973-2021. In such a way that in the first regime (years with a budget deficit size of less than 4.28%), the deficit size had a positive effect on economic growth and in the second regime (years with a budget deficit size greater than 4.28%), the deficit size had a negative effect on economic growth. Therefore, in line with Barrow's (1990) theory, the findings showed that there was an inverse U-shaped relationship between the budget deficit size and economic growth in Iran. Also, the findings showed that investment growth and export growth had a positive and significant effect on economic growth, while the positive effect of population growth on Iran's economic growth was not statistically significant.