پژوهشنامه اقتصاد انرژی ایران
پیاپی 23 (تابستان 1396)

This study is the continuation of a few research studies that have been carried out in Iran and other countries identifying the types of the risks involved in design-build contract. Recently, many Iranian petroleum contracts have been encountered with various claims and disputes which made the industry difficult to cope and imposed heavier direct and indirect costs and expenditures. This research is meant to provide solutions not only how to tackle this risk but also to prevent cases of such bitter events in the petroleum industry. This study endeavors also to identify the risks in the design and build and EPC contracts in petroleum contracts and then to manage and allocate such risks between the Parties to such contracts. Further, the indented and assessed risks alongside with optimized allocated risks have been compared with the Model Contracts of the EPC No. 5490, drafted by the Planning and Supervision Organization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and then recommended solutions are proposed in this paper. It is concluded that one of the main causes of such many claims and disputes in the petroleum industry of Iran, is the lack of professional exercise related to the identification, assessment and managements of the petroleum industry risks. It is also resulted from this study that contracts risks management should be the prevailing exercise to design sustainable policy and strategic approaches to prevent the petroleum projects risks that may be embedded during the execution of the petroleum projects.

The amount of energy consumption per growth affects on economic growth in all countries, so the access of world countries to variety of energy is essential for economic growth. Numerous studies in a world have shown that the pace of growth of energy consumption will largely depend on the level of economic growth. The present study aims to investigate on the researches that has been done on impact of the renewable energy consumption on the economic growth, all over the world. And after that the relation between renewable energy consumption and growth in a selected countries of OPEC members during 1985-2014. With unit root test determine stability of data and proved that all data are stable. The linear Granger causality test indicate unidirectional causality from energy consumption to growth. F limer and hausman test also stimate for determining the Regression model.

Since electricity distribution companies operate in various environmental conditions, their relative efficiency scores used for regulation purposes, should be corrected for environmental factors that could influence the underlying efficiency of them. This paper conducts efficiency correction for 39 Iranian electricity distribution companies applying two stage (DEA and Tobit) analysis in 2015. Accordingly, first to the efficiency performances of the electricity distribution companies are determined using DEA. In the second stage, the Tobit model is emploied to determine the environment factors which may explain the calculated efficiency scores. Based on the results, the rainfall level and the customer mix have negative and positive effects on efficiency of electricity distribution companies, respectively. Hence, the primary efficiency scores of DEA are corrected for environmental influences. The comparison of the primary and the corrected efficiencies indicate a significant changes in the efficiency scores and the ranking of the Iranian electricity distribution companies, such that the efficiency of companies with higher rainfall and lower industrial customers relative to their average, have increased, and vice versa.

This paper analyzes and compares the behavioral responses of the operator to the fiscal regime of the two types of contracts, Iran Petroleum Contract (IPC) and Production Sharing Contracts (PSC) with using the dynamic optimization approach (dynamic programming method). This paper aims to numerically compute the amount of distortions caused by the petroleum contracts, which creates some distortion in the investor's decision regarding to the neutral case that means there is no contractual restrictions including government share of resource rent, tax, extraction timing, cost recovery limit and so on. The focal point of this paper is the application of the stochastic dynamic programming for a real oil field in order to achieve the numerical results and using the deadweight loss (DWL) as an actual measure for assessment of the distortion of the contract regarding the first best case (neutral path). Accordingly, with using the information of the South Azadegan field, the results show that both fiscal terms of IPC and PSC have distortionary effects and the DWL of the IPC is more than that of PSC. For instance, in the reference scenario and reference oil prices the DWL of IPC and PSC are 22/22% and 21/14% respectively.

Market power refers to the ability to affecting to the market. The firm has a pricing power in the monopoly market. One of the types of monopolies is the cartel. Two important features of behavior in form of the cartel are the impact on the amount of production and price. In terms of production, the cartel controls the production through coordination among the members, and in terms of impact on prices, it affects the price of the market by controlling production. In this study, to investigate the market power of OPEC, this issue will be discussed that whether OPEC acts as a cartel, or not? Therefore, to measure the market power of OPEC, The behavior and coordination of OPEC members’ production decisions are being studied. The research hypotheses are as follows, there is coordination in behavior and production decisions between the production of OPEC and the production of OPEC members, and total production of OPEC determines oil prices in the global oil markets. To prove the first hypothesis, used ARDL bounds testing approach of co-integration, and for the second hypothesis, used Toda-Yamamoto tests. The data used in this study includes the production of OPEC members, global oil prices (Brent, Dubai and WTI), in the period of 1994-2016, quarterly and monthly and 1980-2016, annual. The results indicates that there is no long-term relationship between the production of OPEC members and total production of OPEC, also causality from oil prices to OPEC production, also the direction of causality is from oil prices to OPEC production.

Human capital is one of the most important inputs in production function that this factor has a crucial role in economic development process. Human capital in oil-dependent countries such as Iran could be affected by oil revenues as well as the form of distribution of oil rent. These evidences accompanied with contradictory and ambiguous impacts. The aim of this paper is to investigate the nonlinear impact of oil revenue on human capital in Iran during the period of 1975-2014. For this purpose, by using a threshold regression model, human capital has been modeled. The empirical results indicate that when the share of oil revenues in GDP is less than about 0.09, increasing share of oil revenues in GDP has a positive significant impact on human capital that the estimated coefficient is 20.21. But after the threshold level, increasing the share of oil revenue in GDP has a significant positive impact on human capital that the estimated coefficient is 5.37. Therefore, the intensity of oil revenue effect on human capital has been dramatically decreased in high oil revenue regime rather than the low oil revenue regime. Therefore, decreasing dependency to oil revenues increases human capital.