نشریه تحلیل های اقتصادی توسعه ایران
سال سوم شماره 3 (پیاپی 8، پاییز 1394)

Poverty has been one of the main issues among economists, politicians and social scientists in different countries. Poverty alleviation is considered as the main objective of economic development. Undoubtedly, the objective of providing social protection by government is to reduce poverty and to increase the welfare of the people. Without increases in efficiency and productivity, none of the economic systems can improve the living standards. Improving the economic performance of the government is a common objective of all economic systems. This paper examines the effectiveness of the government's economic policies on reducing poverty, provides a snapshot of the size of the government's performance in reducing poverty and determines factors affecting policy effectiveness regarding resources available during 1983 to 2012. This paper uses the Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) in order to calculate efficiency of poverty-reducing policies. The results indicate government efficiency in poverty reduction by 69 percent. Outstanding bank loans, inflation rate and unemployment rate have significant positive impacts on the level of technical inefficiency.

Classification of consolidated financial development in the provinces of Iran and its effects on economic growth of the financial Sectors is an important factor in the Iranian economy. Therefore, there are several studies in this area. The aim of this study is to complement previous studies and utilize the advantage of provincial data. Beyond several indexes that can be applied for financial development measurement such as rate of facilities to GDP, deposits to GDP, and private sector debt to GDP we preferred to calculate a unique index based on TOPSIS mechanism that contained whole indicators as well. This index covers data from 28 provinces during 2001 to 2012. In the next step effect of this indicator on economic growth is estimated with SYS-GMM including government expenditure and inflation as instrumental variables. Results indicate that there is a direct relationship between financial development and economic growth: Government expenditure and inflation has a negative effect on economic growth which can exacerbate FD effect.

In today's competitive environment, for every country, product growth and stabilizing economic fluctuations are the main macroeconomic objectives. Using knowledge-based economy or knowledge-based indicators are one of the most important demand management tools. Knowledge is considered to be the main capital; and economic growth is rooted in the accumulation of knowledge and as a source of knowledge accumulation technology, innovation and entrepreneurship. Hence, with regard to the economy of Iran, it is important to examine the effects of knowledge economy on product growth. The main objective of this study is to investigate the effect of knowledge economy on output growth using models based on conventional economic growth. Data was extracted from the Central Bank from the annual time series during the period of 1353- 1391, Using Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA) and Firefly Algorithm (FA), the effects of knowledge based economy indicators, including, education and human resources, information and communication technology, capital and trade openness, on output, was tested. Based on the research findings, the hypothesis of the study, including the positive impact of knowledge economy and its effects on GDP growth was accepted.

In this Research, the relationship between foreign direct investment, economic freedom and economic growth is investigated in a panel of 84 selected countries during 2000-2012. For this purpose, the GMM approach has been applied. More precisely, this paper examines the impact of FDI on economic growth through the channel of economic freedom. Estimation results show that FDI by itself has no positive effect on economic growth. However, the effect of FDI on economic growth depends on the level of economic freedom in the host countries. The main channel of absorption capacity of host countries to benefit from spillover effects of multinational firms is economic freedom. Also FDI has positive and significant effects on economic growth in countries with high economic freedom and countries with higher middle economic freedom. Moreover among components of economic freedom, the components related to Size of Government, Security of Property Rights, Freedom to Trade Internationally, and Regulation of Labor, Credit and Business have the most positive effect on the effect of FDI on economic growth.

The investigation of the relationship between water pollution and its determinants is one of the important issues in environmental economics and has been studied empirically in recent years. Moreover, in most empirical studies the nexus between industrial and agricultural development and water pollution has not been considered. So, to address this lacuna, the main objective of this paper is to examine the effects of industrial and agricultural development on water pollution emission in the Iranian economy over the period of 1975 to 2014 in short-run and long-run. For this purpose, the empirical econometric model has been estimated by T-Y and DOLS approaches for these sectors during the period of study. The results of this paper show that the EKC curve is confirmed in Iran and industrial value added and population density in urban areas have positive and significant effects on water pollution. Moreover, the value added of agricultural sector has negative and significant effect on water pollution.

In this paper, we investigate the effect of petroleum reserves on economic growth with emphasis on democracy using GMM method during 1960 -2012. We focus on three groups: (1) high-income countries (Australia, America, UK, Denmark, Norway and Canada), (2) middle-income countries (Colombia, Malaysia, Iran, Gabon, Ecuador and Algeria) and (3) low-income countries (Egypt, India, Indonesia and Syria). The dependent variable is GDP (in 2005 constant prices), and independent variables are oil reserves, the size of government, democracy, trade openness, and consumer price index. The results confirm the resource curse in the middle-income countries but reject it among the high-income and low-income countries.