فهرست مطالب m. bakhshoodeh

Water security is defined as the physical and economic access of rural households to sufficient and reliable amounts of water to meet their agricultural needs, as well as their ability to defend their rights before the relevant authorities. Due to the changing pattern of rainfall and irregular rainfall and recent droughts in the country, better management of water resources and recognition of components and relationships between them is of great importance. In this study, to measure and determine the effective factors of water security, cross-sectional data related to 180 farmers in Ramjard region were collected by random sampling method through a questionnaire. The water security index was defined as the mixture of water availability, water assurance, water adequacy, ability to pay, willingness to pay, and legal issues (water conflict and problem solving procedure) and was measured using the Principal Components Analysis (PCA). The results showed farms that use integrated water resources have higher water security. The results of estimation of ordinary least squares method also showed that the variables of distance from the dam, the position of the land and the downfall well have negative effects and the type of channel, literacy level and training classes have positive effects on water security. It is expected that training farmers to repair and maintain irrigation systems, saving water and use of modern irrigation technology accompanying with further attention of the local authorities to address water supply problems and to inspect distribution and transmission of water may achieve the objective of water security.

This study aimed at analyzing the demand for meat to achieve a measure of Iranian net seller households. For this purpose, using an almost ideal demand system (AIDS), considering the endowment income effect in the Slutsky equation, the compensatory own-price elasticities were calculated. A comparison of the compensatory elasticity calculated with and without endowment income effect showed a low endowment income effect for these households because of the low difference between compensatory elasticities. But for the rural households, the compensatory elasticity calculated through Slutsky's new equation indicated that the endowment income effect in the rural households was higher than that of the urban households. The compensatory elasticities calculated with Slutsky's new equation for poultry meat showed that 58 percent of the urban households and 18 percent of the rural households were the net buyers and also, 42 percent and 82 percent of these households were the net sellers, respectively. According to the results, all the urban households were net buyers for fish and the number of rural households known as the net sellers of this type of meat was more than that of its net demanders. Also, 84 percent of the urban households and 10 percent of the rural households were the net buyers of red meat. On the other hand, the number of households in higher-income groups that were the net buyers of red and fish meat and the net sellers of poultry was added. Finally, it was recommended the net sales evaluation for other food groups to achieve more accurate results in policy analysis.

Off-farm activities have become an important component of livelihood strategies among rural households in most developing countries. According to available evidence, off-farm income is an important source of income for most rural households, which is important for economic, governmental and nongovernmental organizations, and international representatives of development and advancement. Several studies have reported a substantial and increasing share of off-farm income in total household income. Reasons for this observed income diversification includes declining farm income and the desire to insure against agricultural production and market risks. Non-agricultural activities, which are referred to as off-farm activities, are part of the rural economic sector, which is essential for improvement and assistance that can be referred to as an economic incentive for activities as well as field activities. Due to the development of off-farm activities in rural areas, its share of income has slowly increased and off-farm incomes appear as a contributing factor to the flow of income, which is due to its low income variation. Off-farm activity is a factor in creating diversity in activities and strategies to increase incomes, especially in the time of farm production decline among rural households. Using the theory of time allocation of households, incentives to allocate time to out-of-field activities, which not only relate to wage factors but also family structure and individual preferences, are identified.

In order to investigate the effect of various factors on having an off-farm activity, regression models with a dummy dependent variable are required. Farmers' time allocation to different activity is a function of some variables, such as individual, regional and family characteristics. The model used in the present study is as follows:  In which the dependent variable is a multiple choice that in this study shows employment in various activities including agriculture, activities related to agriculture and non-agricultural activities. The multinomial logit model was used to investigate the factors affecting the time allocation of farmers in Marvdasht. Another objective of the present study is to answer the question of whether off-farm activity will increase or decrease income inequality. To measure the inequality created by each source of income, the income-resource variance was used. The percentage of total inequality decomposition is obtained from the following formula. It shows the extent to which inequality is created for each source of income. 

Based on the results, comparing the results of the Logit model and the multinomial logit model indicate that the type of non-agricultural activities is important in the allocation of time and the establishment of various policies for the development of off-farm activities. The level of education has a positive effect on off-field employment due to its effect on creating more job opportunities for individuals. The amount of land owned by the farmer was another important factor in the implementing off-farm activities unrelated to agriculture. According to the results in Marvdasht County, variables such as age, education, livestock breeding, number of extension classes, number of dependent persons, household expenses, expenditure to agricultural income, family labor force and car value have a significant effect on the probability of time allocation to outside activities related to agriculture. Regarding agricultural activities, all variables except for the history of land use and land use ratio have a significant effect on the dependent variable. Also, based on the results, the lowest and largest share of income inequality in households are related to the off-farm activities which is unrelated to agriculture and farming, respectively. Creating the necessary facilities to increase the level of education of households, encouraging off-farm activities for small farmers, along with investing in the development of off-farm activities in rural areas can help to allocate their time to non-agricultural activities along with agriculture and increase income equality.

This study aimed at estimating the consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) a premium price and examining the factors influencing them for health-oriented chicken meat in Shiraz city of Iran. For this purpose, the health-oriented chicken meat with three attributes (including antibiotics free production process, full emptying of chicken abdominal contents during slaughtering and average carcass weight, i.e. size chicken, at the place of supply) was primarily introduced to the consumers. Contingent valuation method with single and double bounded questionnaires was used to assess the consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) by completing 601 face to face questionnaires during autumn 2017. By performing a pretest, the parameters of the WTP distribution of target statistical population were determined and based on the methodology of Cooper (1993), the bid price vector was selected optimally. The results of the econometric models estimation showed an efficiency superiority of the double-bounded model over the single-bounded model. In addition, the household head’s educational level and the household income indicated positive effects on WTP while age and household dimension represented significantly negative effects. The extra consumers' WTP for health-oriented chicken meat was estimated to be averagely 26420 and 24240 IR Rial/Kg for single and double bounded models, respectively, that is, 35 and 32 percent of the conventional chicken meat price. Willing to pay an extra price implicitly implies a potential demand, suggesting an opportunity for the producers to gain from the health-oriented chicken meat in the market.

In this study, to examine the consumers’ behavior and to calculate the price and expenditure elasticity, the Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System was used and the circumstances of income distribution among different income groups were shown using the deducted indices from this system. To reach the goals of this study, the Iran’s statistics center data of household expanses in 1386 was used and the seemingly unrelated regression estimator (sure) was estimated using the Eviews 5 software. The selected goods liable to subsidy are vegetable oil, sugar, bread and rice. The results obtained from the expenditure elasticity shows the rural consumers’ higher tendency towards increasing the consumption of the goods than the urban consumers. Considering the low price elasticity of the under study goods it seams that using just the price policies to correct the consumption model is not enough. By studying the results obtained from the applied demand system, it was observed that in urban areas the highest inequality is in the high- income group and in rural areas in the low- income group.

Providing strategies to increase water efficiency is one of the vital policies in agricultural sector. In this study, survival analyzing model was applied first to investigate factors affecting duration of accepting laser land leveling in centre of Marvdasht city. Then, the likelihood of accepting this technology by farmers was determined. Required data were collected by questionnaire based interviews from classified random sample of 240 farmers. Based on the findings of the survival analyzing model, age, agricultural background, education, extension classes, land under cultivation of crops, off-farm incomes, family size, financial shortage, small size of available lands and, lack of information about this technology and its benefits, have significant effects on delay in accepting laser leveling technology. Moreover, the possibility of accepting this technology by farmers has increased over time. That is around %60 of the farmers utilized the technology in 2007 and %86 in 2008. Based on the results, it is recommended to well inform farmers about the respected benefits of such technologies before introducing them in order to create sufficient incentives, and to provide financial supports, to facilitate accepting the technologies and consequently to increase water use efficiency in farms.

Productivity growth indicates significant differences between provinces that grow faster and whose lags behind others. The differences in the rates of productivity growth in various provinces may be the result of regional inequalities. Therefore, it is important to understand the long-run movement in the district level productivity differences and take effective measures (such as higher investment in infrastructure, research and development, etc). With regard to the importance of this topic, this study is finding out whether or not there has been a tendency towards convergence in grain productivity in the last two decades? Results indicate that on average during 1984 and 2003, some provinces had high productivity growth. In contrast, some provinces had experienced negative productivity growth in grain production. This conclusion is concerning the disparity between grain producer provinces in Iran. The convergence results show that some provinces with low initial levels of productivity have a potential to grow faster than provinces with high productivity and so are converging to the mean TFP. While the gap in productivity differences in some provinces is widening and productivity differences will not vanish in the long run.

In this study, marketing situation, problems and services of Dutch Roses was investigated in Isfahan province as a main rose producing region in Iran. In this context, marketing margin, share of marketing agents in marketing margin, marketing cost coefficients and marketing efficiency were calculated and marketing path and marketing services of roses flower including harvesting, transportation, packing, sorting and standardization in major path were investigated. The data used in this study were gathered through completing questionnaires from 38 producers, wholesalers (cut flowers distributors) and retailers (flower sellers) and by interviewing four consulting companies in Dutch Roses production and marketing. The results indicated that 56.5 percent of producers are only engaged with production activities and not exporting flowers to either foreign countries or the other provinces in the country. In the main path, average coefficient of technical efficiency (78.17%) was found to be higher than that of price efficiency (34.67%) and based on the marketing efficiency, 108 Rial value added can be achieved from each 100 Rial marketing services cost.

The main objective of this study was determining the best sprinkler system and ranking total operational sprinkler systems in Isfahan province. The data was collected through 262 questionnaires completed by farmers in Feridan and Semirom cities in Isfahan province. Ranking and comparing the systems were done via criteria matrix and qualitative efficiency of objects and compromise programming. Based on the results of this study, hand-move sprinkler irrigation and then solid-set sprinkler irrigation were found to be the best systems in most of the regions. However, solid-set sprinkler irrigation was the best in some other areas. Results also showed that there were trivial differences between farmer selection in sprinkler irrigation and suitable system in the region. Also, comparison of suitable system and conventional irrigations used by farmers showed that the current systems of farmers are not usually an optimal system.

Evaluating different aspects of government policy in terms of their indirect and welfare effects has been always of interest. In this study, the effects of gauranteed purchasing policy on land under cultivation and yields of cotton, potatoes and onions were investigated in Fars province. For this purpose, a Nerlove model was applied to time series data of 1972-02 after testing their stationary to estimate the cultivated lands and yields functions of these products. The use of protection rates as explantory varrables is one of the interesting characteristic of such a model. Although the results were not similar for all the products, the indication is that the policy has not had significant influence on the land areas and yields of cotton, potatoes and onions. However, taking into account that the policy has been recentely commenced in Fars, and that the policy takes time to become effective, the policy may result in different outcomes in the long run.

This paper attempts to introduce two indices for measuring the level of Intra-industry Trade (IIT) between Iran and the members of the European Economic Community (EEC) according to five agricultural product groups. For this purpose, the indices suggested by Grubel-Lioyd and Aquino, were employed and explained how these indices obtained. The required data and information were collected from the year books and the internet site of “Iran Trade Point”. In general, the measured indices indicated a low level of trade between Iran and the members of EEC. In three groups, export value was higher than import value. On the contrary, for the two another groups of cereals and flowers, the import values were higher in most years. But in general, there wasn't seen any certain trend in indices values. In addition, many uses of these two indices also explained. Because Intra-Industry Trade is a new subject, further study and research seems to contribute to the economic communities specially in Iran.