Iranian Economic Review
Volume:15 Issue: 26, Spring 2010

Globalization is a complementary pattern beyond borders that brings about international investment, foreign trade, expansion of information and technology, convergence of production and consumption and integration of financial markets. Economic integration is an aspect of globalization which causes a decrease in prejudicial preventions among countries. In addition, it leads to the simplification of more extensive consumption markets, proficiency in production, use of capital and financial sources, use of technology spillovers, access to foreign investment and international cooperation. In this paper we focus on spillovers, arising from R&D development, trade relations and technology transfer. This study investigates the relationship between R&D spillovers, trade integration and their cross effects on expansion of trade flows in East - West Asia and Pacific. Accordingly, we use an augmented gravity trade model and estimate it the panel data approach to analyze the impacts of R&D spillovers and other determinants on bilateral trade relations among the selected Asia-Pacific countries over the period of 1995-2008. The results indicate that R&D spillovers and integration accelerate the trade flows.

The application of the artificial neural networks in economics and business goes back to 1950s, while the main part of the applications has been developed in more recent years. Reviewing this research indicates that the development and applications of neural network are not limited to a specific application area as it spans a wide variety of fields from prediction to classification, as most of the applications in economics primarily focus on the predictive power of the neural networks. Many researches using statistical and Neural Networks (NNs) models in economics but few involved support vector machines in their studies. In this paper for the first time we compare the approximate economic behavior ability of artificial neural networks (ANN) and support vector machines using a set of data on some Middle East countries.

In this paper we have studied the adoption rate of mobile phone in Iran via the new technology diffusion models approach. The result show that its diffusion pattern has a S shaped curve which is consistent with logistic model. Effective factors in diffusion pattern are: population, GDP, digitalization of the telecommunication system, government expenditures on the telecommunication sector, price of mobile phone and the inflation rate. We have also found that the logistic model has a batter explanatory power than the time series models.

Man have always had to confront the crisis of shortage in resources in the history. Therefore civilizations and societies were searching for ways through which they could gain the utomost output. One of the determining factors in developing countries is the increase in efficiency and productivity in various social and economical aspects. In this study we try to investigate and measure the productivity changes in food industry via data envelopment analyses (DEA) and Malmquist index. We have used 27 provinces of Iran, during 1992 to 2001. The average productivity in the period is as following: 1.41, 1.01, 1.25, 0.81, 1.43, 1.21, 1.1, 1.1, and 1.37. Therefore except one year, the productinsty’s trend is up warding.

Nowadays, Growth and value stocks are the important subjects in capital markets. First, these two stocks based on different variables such as estimation of their amount of risks and returns, circumstances of obtaining returns at different periods in up and down market conditions were realized in Tehran Stock Exchange. Then Growth stock with Value Stock was compared through variables such as firm size, return and risk premium. In this study, the data was collected from 123 listed companies during years 2001 to 2008. The results show that firm size is not suitable to realize growth and value stock from each other. Also an investor by purchasing the growth stock obtains the risk premium more than value stock in up market and growth stocks returns are greater than value stock returns in Tehran stock exchange.

The electricity in Iran, like many other countries, has undergone a reform. This reform which separated the distribution sector from the regional electricity companies took place in 1993. The main objective of this paper is to analyze the cost structure of Iranian regional electricity companies with respect to scale and cost efficiency, in order to evaluate the changes in the performance of these companies through the reform. To that end, a translog average cost function was estimated for a panel of 16 Iranian regional electricity companies over the period 1989–1990 to 2002–2003, using the time–varying cost efficiency frontier model suggested by Cornwell, Schmidt and Sickles (1990). The results indicate the existence of economies of scale pre and post–reform for all companies; however, it is more evident after the reform. In addition, the findings on cost efficiency show that most of these companies were suffering from the low efficiency, and the reform has improved the efficiency of the majority of companies.

In this paper the Auto Regressive Distributed Lag(ARDL) model has been utilized in order to study the long-terun relations among the elements of direct taxes on the income distribution within the years 1971-2004 and during the third Five-Year Economic Development Plan. Long-terun relations imply that during the hird Five-Year Economic Development Plan only the tax on property has been able to lower the Gini coefficient, while income and corporate taxes have only served to worsen income distribution. Also, improvement of the efficiency of the labor force as well as the income from oil and gas and the extent of openness of the economy in the long run have led to the improvement of income distribution and decrease of inequality. However, increase in the unemployment rate during the above- mentioned period has increased income inequality.

Economists and policy-makers believe that the fiscal decentralization is an effective strategy to promote economic growth. This study intends to analyze the relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth in Iran, over the period of 2001-2007 across the 30 provinces of the country. A nonlinear fixed effect panel model is specified. The results show that fiscal decentralization has a positive effect on economic growth of Iran.