مجله دانش و توسعه
پیاپی 28 (پاییز 1388)

According to national significance and strategic position of Iranian petrochemical industry, the necessity of doing a study about petrochemical industry is an inevitable issue. This paper with introducing a step to step model for current petrochemical products and future vision, based on suggested and enacted projects, explains the effective model of managing industrial clusters. The main characteristics of the model is existence of marketing plan, market researches, commercialization of the created idea and implementing in industrial clusters to foster knowledge accumulation in petrochemical R&D centers. According to enhancement of global and internal production of methanol and its market prospect, this model was developed for methanol. Allocating a part of internal methanol is necessary for producing with added products. For this purpose, building of methanol cluster will suggest by investment around 1.9 billion dollars. This methanol cluster includes 14 units and annual selling around 1 billion dollars which create over 2800 opportunities of employment and brings economic and industrial prosperity in petrochemical industry.

The purpose of this article is to provide economic evaluation of Sarbisheh road to frontier market of mile 78 (Southern Khorasan Province) and analysis its social- economic effects. So, first survey of this cases, such as: region characters of case study (Southern Khorasan Province and Sarbisheh town), path present situation of case study, 3 sectional recommended path of researcher, analysis of construction and improvement costs of this sectional recommended path compare with benefits of upward mobility of technical mobility paths. Then, presented cost- benefits analysis of project that include: cost operation and its monetary benefits (saving of energy consumption), decline in time travel and its monetary benefits, decline of accidents and its damages and monetary benefits, saving in operational costs, role of this study in expansion of commercial trades (export and import), because of decline of distance for goods transit to Afghanistan and also, provide economic boom for southern Khorasan Province. The last part of this paper calculated, net present value (discount rate:12 percentage) and internal rate of return (19/4 percentage) so that, this results indicate high economic rationalization for this project.

Awareness of existence of advantage in various sectors of each country is a necessary guide to assess its presence degree in international markets. As now, our country is a supervisor member of WTO, it is necessary to identify different industries so that we can have our favorite advantage in the global trade. In this study through domestic resource cost index, we estimated the relative advantage in the production of hand- made silk 65 raj carpet which is known as the best carpet for production-export purposes in 3 provinces of Qom, Esfahan, and West Azarbaijan in 1385. On the other hand, regarding the fact that government policy in various sectors affects the relative advantage, it is necessary to compute the protection coefficient to investigate the protection volume in these sectors. Results indicated the existence of production relative advantage in these 3 provinces. Furthermore, nominal protection coefficient of output shows that in every 3 provinces, indirect subsidies were imposed on protection, but nominal protection coefficient of factors show that producers pay indirect taxes for using these factors. Finally, effective protection cost shows that the sum of government protection of production and government indirect policy on tradable factors is positive. Generally speaking, government policy protects output production process.

In the last decade, the analysis of price relationship along production chain from producer through consumer has been a common tool for measuring efficiency rate and competitiveness of different markets. Markets of agricultural products, meat and dairy are received the most attention by researchers. In the present paper, we studied the price relations and how price is transmitted between the producer level and the consumer level for cheese. Data used in the research include consumer price index and producer price index for cheese covering monthly periods of 91 months since March 2001 to October 2008. Johansen's and Juselius's cointegration method and Granger causality test were used to examine whether there is a relationship between the two indices and to determine causality direction. The behavior of price transmission was analyzed based on the Hack's traditional method and utilizing Von Cramon-Loy ECM model

This article is intended to assess the capacity and trade potential in products between Iran and 25 European Union member countries by using 4 indices of Drysdale, Cosines, Trade Potential and Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) for the period of 1999-2003. Some findings of the research are as follows: The estimation of Iran’s export potential for exporting to the European Union members during the period of 1999-2003 shows that the most part of Iran’s export potential belongs to Germany with an annual amount of $1/24billion. Countries such as Italy, Netherlands, France and Belgium have the next high ranks respectively. The least value of Iran’s export potential with an amount of $5 million belongs to newly acceded countries to European Union including Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovak, Estonia and Malta. The most part of the Iran’s unused export potential belongs to UK (89%) and next ranks belong to Netherlands, Finland and Portugal. As regards Iran’s import potential, the highest rank belongs to Germany ($3/7 billion) and next ranks are for Italy, France and Belgium. On the other hand, the least value of Iran’s import potential, with less than $100milion, is for Cyprus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Malta. According to Drysdale Index calculation, Italy had the highest degree of trade complementarily with Iran in 1999 and countries such as Poland, Slovenia, Lithuania and Spain had the next ranks. In the same period, the least degree of trade complementarily belonged to Estonia, Latvia and Ireland. This index had been faced with some fluctuations during the period. The value of Drysdale Index for Lithuania, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and Finland was more than 1 and for the others was less than 1. Cosines Index for Iran’s export and EU’s import also indicates that Cyprus and Ireland has the most potential for trade cooperation with Iran, while the Malta has the least one. The important point is that the differences of index values among the EU countries are very low. Cosines Index for Iran’s import and EU’s export also shows that UK and Austria have the highest degree of potential for trade cooperation with Iran and Malta has the lowest one. The findings show that 25 of EU member countries and Iran have totally about 4944 items of goods for export according to the “RCA” index. Italy with 2097 items and Malta with 168 items have the most and least ranks in this field. Among the 4944 “RCA” items, 4637 items (94%) belong to EU member countries and only 307 items (6%) belong to Iran.

Economic freedom or individual freedom in doing transaction, exchange and assets transfer, which is obtained from legal channel, have significant effects on economic growth in society with relatively efficient institutions such as property rights security and transaction cost reduction, via motivating and promoting competition. This study investigates the effect of economic freedom on economic growth with due attention to institutional economic literature and use of Lakatuch methodology. Also it recognizes the paths of the relationship between economic freedom and growth. The utilized model is the combination of Winhold dynamic model (1993) and Carlsson and Lundstrom model (2001) that study 57 countries during 2000-2006. Also in order to studying these countries exactly, it classifies countries to three categories: Low, middle and high institutional quality. The result shows positive relationship between economic freedom and growth with due attention to efficiency of exist institutions in society. Two sub-index, "property rights security and legal structure" and "laws of labor and credit market and business" of Fraser Economic Freedom whole index that have been selected as economic freedom representation, have positive and significant effect on economic growth. This confirms initial hypothesis that shows importance of institutions in each society

During the last century, rapid urbanization and population growth have resulted in water shortage and pollution, so it is necessary to consider water as an important economic goods and manage its utilization in economic way. In order to manage water demand, it is an important issue to get information about demand function. Thus in this paper we use the Stone-Gray utility function to derive demand function. Then we use a Vector Autoregressive Regressive (VAR) model for estimating water demand in Orumieh city for the period of1378-84. The results of the research indicate that: 1) Water demand is depend directly on the consumer income and indirectly on the price of water, 2) Water demand is inelastic respect to the income and price and also to the other goods prices, 3) Rainfall and temperature have insignificant impacts on the water demand, and 4) It is found that water is a necessary goods.

Monetary policy makers have been engrossed continually to discover the suitable method for exchange rate forecasting in order to preventing its disruptive movements. But exchange rate movement's manifold determinants cause to its complex and nonlinear behavior. Nonlinear models have better performance for its forecasting. Therefore, in this study the performance of nonlinear models such as ANFIS and NNARX and linear model such as ARIMA were compared in Iran's Rial/US$ & Rial/€ for 2, 4 and 8 days ahead via most important forecast performance criteria and daily data related to 20 March 2002- 21 November 2008. Results indicated that ANFIS and NNARX models have better performance in comparison with ARIMA model, and ANFIS model outperforms NNARX model in all horizons of Iran's Rial/US$ & Rial/€ exchange rate forecasting.

Current collapses of big companies and the worse fluctuations of the financial markets have evoked the awareness of the stakeholders and managers to utilize suitable tools to predict the financial distress of companies. One of such tools is the application of financial ratios as independent variables and developing models to predict bankruptcy issue. The objective of this study is first to test the prediction power of original Altman (1983) and Ohlson (1980) models on the dataset of Iranian listed companies and secondly by applying Multiple Discriminant Analysis (i.e. MDA) and Logit Analysis statistical techniques on the same dataset, develop a suitable prediction model for bankruptcy of listed companies in the economic environment of Iran. It was finally concluded that both original Ohlson bankruptcy prediction model in 1980 without any modification of multipliers and coefficients and Logistic regression technique showed better prediction results than original Atman model in 1983 or Discriminant analysis technique.