Iranian Economic Review
Volume:19 Issue: 39, Spring 2015

In recent years, the studies of location play a key role in success and stability of economic activities. Location studies are under consideration in both national and international levels. Meanwhile, identification of goals and methods of solving location problems have significant importance. The purpose of this paper is to examine spatial distribution of economic activities in 14 zones of Esfahan. In parallel to this approach, existing activities in Esfahan have been classified homogeneously into 32 activity groups. Then, the zones with diversification and specialization have been studied, as well as effective factors on location of these activities by using of a regression model. Considering locational data in this survey, the specified model, have been estimated by spatial econometric methods to consider spatial effects in model as far as possible. Based on research results, both specialization and diversification factors are effective factor on location of economic activities in Esfahan. The results show that contiguity factor is effective on distribution of activities; therefore spatial relationship exists among the various zones of Esfahan.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of oil, natural gas and coal consumption in Iran’s economic growth during the periods from 1980 to 2012. The stationary analysis is performed by using ADF and Phillips-Perron unit root test and Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach was used to test for co-integration between the variables. The findings show that the variables are cointegrated; it means there is a long-run equilibrium relationship between the consumption of energy and economic growth. Accordingly the consumption of natural gas and coal was concluded to have positive and significant effect on economic growth, while the consumption of petroleum shows no significant effect on economic growth.

The Iranian banking sector has undergone huge and substantial reform in the last decade; privatization, establishment of private banks and development of modern technologies (IT). This paper investigates the competitive condition of the Iranian banking industry over the period 2005-2010 using the H-statistic proposed by Panzar and Rosse. The properties of this non-structural methodology make it an excellent framework for assessing the degree of competition in the banking industry. To calculate H statistics, a reduced form of revenue equation was estimated. The calculated H statistics for the whole sample period was 0.7101.The extent of H statistics and the result of wald test indicate that the structure of Iranian Banking sector is neither monopoly nor competition. Our findings were in favor of monopolistic competition.

The purpose of this study is estimation of daily Value at Risk (VaR) for total index of Tehran Stock Exchange using parametric, nonparametric and semi-parametric approaches. Conditional and unconditional coverage backtesting are used for evaluating the accuracy of calculated VaR and also to compare the performance of mentioned approaches. In most cases, based on backtesting statistics Results, accuracy of calculated VaR is approved for historical, Monte Carlo and Volatility-Weighted historical simulation methods. It is also approved for GARCH type of volatility models under normal distribution and Riskmetrics model under student-t distribution. On the other hand, it is observed that parametric approach measures VaR value more than non-parametric and semi-parametric approaches. This result indicates that GARCH type of volatility models under student-t distribution overestimate magnitude of value at risk. Finally, four volatility models of parametric approach including NARCH, NAGARCH and APGARCH under normal distribution and Riskmetrics under student-t distribution are selected best methods to measure accurate value of VaR.

This paper investigate Iranian tourism demand to Malaysia using the recently developed autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) ‘Bound test’ approach to cointegration for 2000:Q1 to 2013:Q4. The demand for tourism has been explained by macroeconomic variables, including income in Iran, tourism prices in Malaysia, tourism price substitute, travel cost and trade value between Iran and Malaysia. In addition, three dummy variables, namely September 11 terrorist attack in 2001, the outbreak of SARS in 2003 and increase exchange rate in 2011 are also included. The results show that a long-run relationship exists between variables. Iranian tourist arrivals to Malaysia are positively influenced by Lag dependent variable (word of mouth), tourism price adjusted by exchange rate, tourism price substitute and trade value. Iranian tourists seem to be highly sensitive to the price variable. Also, ever since the September 11 attack, Malaysia has become an oasis for tourists from the Middle East (Iran) as it is able to provide a safe haven for Muslim tourists as an alternative destination.

In this paper we investigate the effect of oil price shocks on stock market index in Iran, by using of a structural VAR (SVAR) approach. We used four variables in the model namely Kilian index, global oil supply, real oil price and real stock market index. The data are monthly and spanning the period 1997M10-2014M12. We identify the effect of four different shocks on stock market including oil supply shock, aggregate demand shock, other oil-specific shock and other stock-specific shock. Empirical evidences from impulse response functions (IRFs) indicate that oil supply shock is not significant, and the impact of other three shocks persists for about 3, 6 and 2 months respectively. Variance decomposition (VD) of stock market index indicates “other stock-specific shock” is the most important explainer of its variations. These findings are consistent with the findings of other oil-exporting countries including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Mexico, Norway, Russia, Venezuela and Canada except the effect of oil supply shock in variance decomposition of stock market index.

The underground economy has long been of interest to economists and has devoted extensive studies to itself in economic literature. Through fuzzy logic approach in present research, we estimated the size of underground economy of Iran over the period of 1978-2010. For this purpose and according to theoretical bases and previous studies, variables such as GDP per capita, ratio of direct taxes to GDP and an index of business environment for considering the effect of institutional structures have been used as the most important explanatory variables for estimating country's underground economy. For considering the quality of institutions in this research we have used a local index for the first time compared with other internal studies. Our results indicate an oscillatory trend as the average of relative and absolute size of underground economy has decreased during the years of first development plan compared with period of war and revolution but increased during the second plan compared with the first one. Also it has decreased over the years of third plan in comparison with the second one but again it has increased during the fourth development plan. According to the results, the average of relative size of underground economy to official output during the years of war and revolution, first, second, third and the fourth development plan was approximately estimated 21, 12, 29, 19 and 20 percent respectively. During the entire period it was approximately 20 percent.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of import of technology on Iranian Economy. We have used multi-sectoral and multi–regional computable general equilibrium GTAP model. Transfer of technology from one region to another is another factor effecting productivity. Trade is one of the channels that speeds the transfer of technology. The effect of a ten percent productivity shock, in high-tech industries of industrial countries have been tracked on economic sectors of Iran. The result show that productivity of high technology industrial sectors in Iran has increased by 3.6%, GDP has increased by 0.52%, while inflation decreased by 1.19% in the Iranian economy. The findings also include increases in real sectoral outputs and decrease in the imports.