homayoun shirazi

Since the Islamic Revolution of 1987, Iran has been affected by economic sanctions imposed by Western countries, especially the U.S. Since 2006 and with the development of the Iranian nuclear conflict, the United Nations has frequently imposed economic and financial sanctions against Iran. As a result of these international restrictions and their administration by an international organization, iran's exports has been heavily influenced. This study seeks to address the question whether the economic sanctions imposed against Iran’s exports have been effective. And if yes, and if yes, to what extent this effectiveness, is. Due to the fact that the sanctions imposed on Iran have been at first less economic and they have intensified over time, the effect of the sanctions in the three years of 2012, 2013, and 2014 have been examined by the fixed-effects Gravity model extracted from the model of Anderson and van Wincoop. In addition, all the trade relations and models considered have been estimated through the PPML method to estimate the unbiased coefficients in order to use all the data and to avoid the problem of zeros. Based on our results, the sanctions imposed against Iran have had a significant and negative effect on the amount of export in Iran to all its trading partners considered in all the given years. The examination of the coefficients during the years 2012, 2013, and 2014 show that Iran's value of export has fallen annually by 33 percent in average and the total loss for these three years has been 104 billion dollars.

In the last decade, many applied common studies were done in economic social systems phenomena by using network analysis. In these studies, trade relations can be considered as a network that each vertex represents a country and the trade relations between countries represent links of this network.
First, we try to make the world exporting and importing networks based on the existence data for 104 countries for the years 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2011 and then network properties and topology will be studied based on the network science. Studying the role of Iran and its positions in these trade networks will be calculated and we compare Iran with other important countries in these networks.
Based on the obtained results, all of the constructed trade networks have power distribution and high clustering coefficient in all years and this study confirms that the world trade networks are complex networks. In addition, based on the obtained results from betweeness centrality, Iran is a middle class country in the world trade network. Also, Iran’s score in eigenvector centrality confirms that contrary to the important countries’ trade partners in these trade networks, most Iran’s partners do not trade much with other countries in the network.

National currency depreciation or appreciation has always been argued seriously among policymakers since changing in exchange rate could cause improvement or deficit in trade balance. These changes affect the trade volume of a country in both short-run and long-run. Long-run effects are recognized as the Marshall-Lerner condition, while short-run effects are analyzed by two concepts: J-Curve and S-Curve. In this study, the cross correlation has been calculated between trade balance and real exchange rate by using bilateral trade data between Iran and 21 selected trading partners over the period 1992-2011 in order to explore the existence of S-Curve in Iran. Based on the results, there is an S-Shaped curve for the Iranian trade relations with 14 major trading partners. However, this pattern does not match in relations with Syria, Pakistan, Qatar, Armenia, Kuwait, Azerbaijan, Canada, US and Hong Kong. Furthermore, the empirical results confirm Harberger-Larsen-Metzler effect in Iran`s trade relations with most of its trading partners. According to the results obtained, changes in exchange rate leads to a temporary improvement in Iran’s balance of payments, but this improvement reduces the exchange rate after a while.

Wellbeing as a multidimensional concept has been noticed by many economists and politicians in recent years. In most studies, only the combination of non-economic indicators have been used in order to measure wellbeing while constructing the indicator that includes all geographic, economic and human aspects can help us to study the countries development procedure. The aim of this study is constructing a wellbeing indicator for all developing countries with regard aforementioned aspects.In this study, we attempt to construct a composite indicator based on 8 sub indexes by using factor-analysis and objective method. This indicator has been calculated annually for 88 developing countries for the period 2000-2008.Based on the results, African countries have the lowest wellbeing score among selected developing countries. Also the results show an improvement of wellbeing indicator in Turkey, China and Brazil in recent years. In addition, this indicator had been increased for Iran during aforesaid period, but between the four-year periods 2005-2008, the rate of this growth process has been decreased.

Emigration is such an important topic that has been attained a lot of interest especially in the last three decades. According to the statistics announced by the United Nations، outbound emigrants in recent years have been far from inbound emigrants in Iran. Therefore، investigating the role of various main determinants in the flow of outbound emigrants is so important and could be considered in order to make a policy for emigration control. In this study، we have made an indicator named quality of life by using factor analysis. Afterwards، the effect of quality of life indicator in addition to the other considered variables which investigate the economic and politic factors on emigrating from Iran to the selected OECD countries have been studied between 2002-2011 by the augmented gravity model and dynamic panel data. The results of this study indicate that quality of life، institutional and political factors have the greatest effects on emigrants respectively. In addition، the lag of emigration has positive and important effect on emigration and with increasing the distance the quantity of the Iranian emigrant will be decreased.

The efficiency of the institutions and the level of their effectiveness in trading among the countries are pretty new subjects that have been considered in recent studies. Many researchers believe that the corruption would cause a reduction in trading among the countries. On the other hand some others assume corruption can help to facilitate the transactions process. The main purpose of this paper is to study the effect of corruption on bilateral trade of selected countries in the Middle East between 2002 and 2008 by using gravity model and Panel Data method. We have used Corruption Perception Index in addition to Control of Corruption index as two proxies for studying the effects of corruption on the trade. Based on our results, as one percent reduction in Corruption Perceptions Index would lead to 3.53 percent increase in export in the exporting country. Furthermore one percent reduction of that in a country which imports the goods would induce 2.27 percent increase in trade. JEL Classification Codes: F10, C23

Some of the economists believe that current volume of international trade is less than the volume that has been predicted by the conventional trade theories. Unobserved barriers (i.e. Corruption) are one of the factors that can reduce the volume of trade from the amount that has been predicted by these conventional theories. This research has studied the role of corruption in the trade volume of selected countries in the Middle East and Latin America. In this study we have used an augmented gravity model of trade and panel data. In addition for estimating the model, we have used fixed effects vector decomposition method. The results showed that the trade is inverted-U shape function of corruption and the little amount of corruption in both regions initially helps the amount of trade to increase but when it reaches the threshold, the volume of the trade reduces in the studied countries. In addition, the results indicated that the existence of corruption in the importing country has a negative effect on the trade volume of the studied countries and it can reduce the amount of the bilateral trade.

World trade has grown remarkably quickly in the past decades. Some researchers believe that despite growing trade, the rate of world trade is less potential amount that it can be achieved. From the perspective of these researchers, in addition to transportation costs and customary transaction costs, there are other intangible costs that reduce trade. Quality and efficiency of institutions are one of the factors that can affect the exchange costs. In this paper, we have studied the effect of institutions on trade flows of selected countries in the Middle East by using gravity model and panel data method between 2002 and 2008. The results show that compare to other factors on bilateral trade, the quality of institutions has more affect so that one unit increase in quality of institutions index in exporting and importing countries, would respectively induce 1/58 and 0/7 percent increase in trade between pairs of countries that we have studied. Therefore countries with better institutions are more willing to trade.