فصلنامه پژوهش های رشد و توسعه اقتصادی
پیاپی 3 (تابستان 1390)

One of the economic goals in many countries is providing favorable conditions to boost economic growth. One of the favorable conditions for increasing the production and economic growth is investment in economic infrastructures. In general, investment in economic infrastructures, boost production and economic growth through increasing the factors such as: productivity, development of market area, equilibrium between supply and demand, creating positive externality effects, making better environment for competition and increasing the welfare level. The objectives of this study are investigating the effect of investment per worker in economic infrastructures on the non-oil gross domestic production per worker and investigating the interaction of capital per worker, non-oil economic growth per worker and investment per worker in economic infrastructures. Vector autoregressive model has been used for empirical investigation during the period of 1961-2006. The empirical results of this study show that in long run the effect of investment per worker in the economic infrastructures on the non-oil gross domestic production per worker is positive and investment per worker in the communication infrastructures has the highest effect and investment per worker in energy infrastructure has the lowest effect on the non-oil domestic production per worker. Empirical results also show that in short run the relationship between non-oil economic growth per worker and investment growth per worker in the economic infrastructures is insignificant, but the effect of capital growth per worker on the non-oil economic growth per worker and investment per worker in the infrastructures is significant and positive.

The most attended aspect of the modern economics is its structure which relies heavily on knowledge and awareness. In this competitive world, paying attention to knowledge and relying on innovation is what makes institutions pioneers. In the early 20th century, Joseph Schumpeter and later almost all theoreticians came to believe that the emergence of a phenomenon called job creators or in other words innovative job creators played significant roles in the economic development process and, in Schumpeter’s opinion, something that makes these people stand out is their innovation power particularly in new combinations. With regard to the deep technological gap between the developed and developing countries, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is one way to transfer modern technologies to the developing countries where these innovations could be applied through this transfer. Since the arrival of foreign direct investment to the developing countries brings about spillovers resulting in innovation expansion in these countries. In this article, the effects of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) spillovers on innovation in developing countries are dealt with, considering that the panel data are arranged in the Pool method for the developing countries where the innovation information have been accessible.

Import, which is the basis for significant effects on economics, is influenced by various factors that are essential to be recognized and examined. One of the issues that can influence the demand for import in each country is joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) which can, in fact, affect the demand for import through strategies such as decreasing tariff rates and increasing the extent of mergers in international commerce and relative prices (domestic and foreign prices). In this regard, and considering the high proportion of capital and intermediate commodities in the total import of the country, this article evaluates the effects of Iran joining WTO on the import of capital-intermediate commodities, using Vector AutoRegressive method using the data during 1971-2008. The findings of the study reveal that at long term, the import of such commodities has had high sensitivity towards international commerce and merger in international economies and little sensitivity towards tariff rates and relative prices during the above-mentioned period. The findings of both long-term and short-term periods confirm each other. Also the impulse response function and variance decomposition analyses show that the effect of one standard error which shocks involvement in import demand of studied goods, is approached to zero in three years and integration of international trade is most effective on variations of that demand.

One of the most important macroeconomic discussions is the effects of monetary policies on the real section of economy. With this respect, the present article investigates the asymmetric or symmetric effects of monetary shocks on the economic growth of Iran. In this article, the relevant model extracted from macroeconomic literature of money in Iran's economy is being examined. The results demonstrate that money isn’t neutral in Iran's economy and the effects of monetary policies on growth of Iran's economy are asymmetric. The negative monetary shocks influence the economic growth more than the positive monetary shocks; so that the negative monetary shocks in boom cycles and the positive monetary shocks in recession cycles have more significant effect on the economic growth. According to the result, it can be demonstrated that the effects of monetary shocks on economic growth is larger and more asymmetric if the shocks are bigger, and the lower the monetary shocks, the less the effects, consequently the asymmetry of negative and positive shocks will be slight. Also there are information gaps between economic makers so that the expectations are not formed rationally in Iran. So according to the results, it can be concluded that Iran's economy is in agreement with the Keynesian economics.

According to discussion of export growth and economic growth, export diversification issue has been considered by many policymakers to mean the increase of exports commodity and reducing its dependence on one source of income. In other words, regardless of the composition or concentration of a country’s export, more export commodities means more diversified exports. In recent years, export diversification in developing countries that mainly rely on exporting a single product has become a political priority. This study makes use of the new growth and international trade theories and panel data methods to examine the impact of export diversification on total factor productivity (TFP) and economic growth during the 1999-2007 in D-8 countries. The research results show that export diversification has a positive and statistically significant effect on the TFP and economic growth. Therefore to create economic growth and sustainable development, Iran has to pay attention to the export diversification policy as well as other factors that affect TFP and economic growth.

Interest as investment opportunity cost or cost of required credits in production process plays an important role in cost of goods manufactured. So it is expected that inflation rate might be affected by changes in interest rate. The present paper studies causality relation between changes in interest rate and inflation rate in countries of Mena. Quarterly data concerning interest and inflation rates were analyzed in 16 member countries in Mena in the period 1997-2008. Augmented Dicki-Foler and Philips structural failure tests were used to assess the reliability of time series data. To determine causality relation between two variables of interest and inflation, Granger and Hsiao's causality tests were utilized. The results obtained from Hsiao's and Granger causality tests indicate that the research hypothesis is supported only for Qatar and Djibouti. In other words, in both countries there is a causality relation from changes in interest rate to changes in inflation rate but there isnt such relation in other countries. Considering the results of research, it can be said that policy of reduced interest rate cant lead us toward the intended goal of controlling inflation rate.