فصلنامه برنامه ریزی و بودجه
پیاپی 87 (مهر و آبان 1383)

Developed and Developing countries have remarkably pursued privatization policies during recent decades. The successes followed by performing this policy in developing countries, the collapse of totally concentrated and governmental economic systems and the polices of international economic agential program of economic structure reforms. Although the results of performing this policy have been successful in most developed countries, the results of privatization in developing countries are not fully vivid and in some cases, there are many ambiguities regarding the success of this policy in such countries. Economic policy makers in Iran have began to pay attention to privatization in early 1980s and it was considered and followed in Irans social, economic and cultural plans. This research paper firstly tries to survey issues related to privatization in Irans governmental companies. Next, it compares the efficiency of investments made by private and governmental sectors within 1971-2001 by means of a growth model. The criterion for efficiency is final productivity of capital in both private and governmental sectors. Accordingly, if it is proved that the efficiency of private investments is more than that of governmental sector, one could conclude that performing privatization policy will accelerate economic growth in Iran through increasing the efficiency of investments in the whole country. Otherwise, the obstacles of private sectors efficient activity should be identified in order to pave the way for improving performance and increasing efficiency of private investments. Furthermore, the experiences of successful countries should also be used for privatization and transferring Governments economic activities to private sector. The findings of the paper show that statistically there is no significant difference between the final productivity of capital in private and governmental sectors during the surveyed period. This, in turn, signifies that performing privatization policy and transferring the Governments economic activities to the nongovernmental sector without making structural reforms in Irans economic areas and eliminating the obstacles in the way of private in vestments can not finalize the expectations of this policy and it will not lead to acceleration of Irans economic growth.

This paper tries to evaluate long-run relationship between imports and exports in OPEC member countries during 1960-1998 as well as to test the foreign deficit sustainability in those countries during the same period of time. The author uses Johansen cointegration method to achieve this purpose. The results indicate that there is no long-run relationship between the mentioned variables in I.R Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Gabon, yet the relationship has been observed in Indonesia, United Arab Emirates, Algeria and Nigeria. This relationship could not be surveyed in Iraq, Libya and Qatar (due to data inaccessibility), and neither in Venezuela and Ecuador (due to stationary variables). Absence of a cointegrated relationship between the variables in variables indicates that the foreign deficit is not sustainable and some changes should be made in trade policies.

This paper tries to express the investment behavior of Irans economic sectors during 1959-2001 by means of proposing an econometric model. The results of the model are offered in two options: present status continuation and desirable status. The first option reveals that the continuation of the present trends in Iran will lead to the economic growth of 3.9 percent and total investment growth of 3.9 percent. The growth rate would be 2.7 percent in agricultural sector, 1.5 percent in petroleum sector, 4.4 percent in industry sector and 4 percent in other economic sectors. On the other hand, the results of desirable status option indicate that on average 10.9 percent investments should be made annually to achieve a growth rate of 8.6 percent. In order to reach such a volume of investment, 7 percent of new investments should be undertaken in agricultural sector. Accordingly, the new investments in percent and 9.5 percent respectively. Evidently, materializing such desirable growths is impossible while retaining the existing structures. Hitting such a target needs meeting some requirements including mobilizing savings of private sector, institutionalizing private sector development, reforming and developing financial and banking institutions, preparing a politically favorable and stable investment environment, controlling the inflation and foreign exchange rate fluctuations, reforming the rules and regulations, annulling laws that lead to monopolies and so on.