Testing Relationships between the Relative Size and Import Coefficients:A Case study of 28 Provinces of Iran

In this paper we measure the relationship between relative size and propensity to imports of the regions. The measurement is empirically tested with respect to the following conventional regional theory: "the propensity to import varies inversely with the relative size of regions, thus larger regions are expected to have high multipliers, because they import less, and vice-versa". Since macro and micro regional models are not suitable for such empirical testing, regional input- output model is proposed. For this, we initially used a modified location quotient to estimate input and import coefficients of seven aggregated sectors for 28 provinces in 1380. Then, we employed the econometric techniques to empirically test the above-mentioned relationship. Overall, findings revealed that there is a meaningful relationship between the relative size of the regions and their propensity to imports.