فصلنامه پژوهش های اقتصادی ایران
پیاپی 85 (زمستان 1399)

In the Balance of Payments Constrained Growth (BPCG) model, demand variables such as export and import determine the limit of economic growth in the long run. In this study, we compare the results of both basic and extensive forms of the Thirlwall model for developing oil producing countries considering the key role of oil exports and foreign-exchange reserves. To do so, two groups of oil developing countries are categorized based on the average daily oil production. The first category includes Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Mexico, and the second one is Egypt, Algeria, Nigeria, and Indonesia. Additionally, the price and income elasticities of demand for imports and exports as well as the co-integration are investigated by using an ARDL (Autoregressive Distributed Lag) model and Pesaran and Shin’s bound test. The price and income elasticities are also calculated with Kalman filter method. Then, we calculate the constrained growth in various forms for ten-year overlapping periods from 1960 to 2016 and finally test the validity of the Thirlwall law. The results indicate that Thirlwall law is not confirmed for several developing oil producing countries. The lower rate of real growth compared to constrained growth of payments in some economies including Iran can be attributed to factors such as the lower rate of capital inflow growth than the growth rate of export volumes as well as the positive effect of foreign income on the constrained growth of payments. The results show that the balance of payments is not a limiting factor for Iran's economic growth which confirms the fact that improving economic growth, in the long run, depends on the improving of the supply side.

In this research, the role of nominal exchange rate volatility and business cycles on the banking nonperforming loans was investigated by using Markov-Switching model during 2005-2018 using seasonal data. Business cycles were extracted from GDP by using the Hodrick Prescott filter. Also, the wavelet transform model was used to extract nominal exchange rate fluctuations. The results showed that the exchange rate volatility varies in different periods of time and in longer period of time, the foreign exchange rate volatility has a greater negative and significant effect on nonperforming loans of banking network. It shows a dependence of government on banking network. Also, the impact of business cycles depends on the nonperforming loans regime. The sustainability of low regime is bigger than high regime. The results also show that the impact of value added of different sectors of economy varies in different regimes of nonperforming loans. These results indicate that banking system should take into account the value added of different sectors of economy and nonperforming loans regimes which could decrease nonperforming loans.

Afghanistan is a country having the most refugees in the world. The existence of a long common border and linguistic, religious and cultural similarities between Afghanistan and Iran has created a situation in which the vast majority of Afghan immigrants (43 %) stay in the Iran. After taking up the process of the voluntary return of Afghan refugees with the UNHCR program, 6.2 million people have returned to the home country since 2002. This study is going to use questionnaire data to examine the impact of immigration to Iran on the education and skills of Afghan labor force during the period of 2002-2017. The research results indicate that immigration to Iran has a positive and significant effect on education and skills of Afghan labor force. Besides, the acquired skills, the level of immigrant literacy, the opportunities for education and skills, the type of profession and the duration of their stay in Iran have a significant effect on the employment rate of returning persons. Also, there are significant relationships between: 1) the type of immigrant profession and income, 2) the legality of the immigration process and the opportunities for education and skills in Iran. It also shows that immigration for migrant households is profitable and they are satisfied with immigration to Iran. Hence their satisfaction leads to immigrate again.

The relationship between economic growth and inflation is one of the long-standing issues in macroeconomics, which is theoretically and politically confronted with many controversies. This is especially important for the Iran's economy, which seeks to achieve price stability and accelerate economic growth.  In this regard, the present study has used continuous wavelet transformation to provide a new insight into the relationship between economic growth and inflation with time-frequency analysis in 1369:2–1397:2. The results show that in the long run (more than 4 years), an increase (decrease) in economic growth is accompanied by a decrease (increase) in inflation. In addition, the increase in economic growth has caused inflationary pressures in limited form and in short run (1380-1383). Therefore, it is recommended that policy makers focus more on economic growth in the long run.

The market structure of the sugar industry in Iran, due to the production of high share of products by a few firms, has moved away from competitive market conditions, which is expected to result in market failure due to the inefficiency of monopoly. So the main questions addressed in this paper are; How we can increase the share of low-income firms and what is the relationship between the efficiency of firms and the market structure of this industry. In order to answer these questions, using the cross-efficiency ranking method, the maximum relative distance from the anti-ideal virtual decision-making unit based on the data envelopment analysis method and the efficiency of these companies was evaluated. Then, using parametric models, the relationships among behavior, profitability, efficiency and market structure of these firms were examined. Statistics and information of sugar factories in Iran in 2014 were analyzed using GAMS and SHAZAM softwares. Based on the results, there is an interaction relationship between structure and performance in the industries in sugar supply chain. Increasing the profitability of small-scale units compared to large units by implementing supportive policies and reducing the cost of providing inputs, increasing the efficiency and quality of sugar production through investment in R&D, branding, developing new markets by implementing export incentive policies and productivity management cycle are ways to modify the structure of the sugar supply chain.

Financial development is one of the main goals of economic policymakers to achieve sustainable economic growth. One of the important approaches to financial development is the expansion and deepening of the stock market. However, such expansion needs improvement of good governance, or institutional quality. Given the importance of this issue, the present study investigates the effect of institutional quality indicators (voice and accountability, political stability without violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and corruption control) on stock market variables by two Islamic countries group (10 countries) and non-Islamic countries (37 countries) during period from 2002 to 2016 using data panel method. The results showed that the institutional quality components plays an important role in the growth of stock prices relative to the growth of the average return on the whole economy as well as the increase in the volume of stock trading relative to the growth of the total turnover in both groups of countries. However, the impact of these components on the group of Islamic countries is far greater than that of non-Islamic countries. In addition, foreign direct investment, increasing real GDP at a constant price, and government final expenditure at constant price in both groups of countries have a significant impact on the growth of stock trading volumes and stock prices.

In this paper we have tried to evaluate efficiency and productivity performance of Iranian manufacturing industries during the period 1995-2015. For this purpose we have used the data of Iranian two digits manufacturing Industries based on ISIC classification and used technique of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Malamquist Index. To compare the relative performance of manufacturing industries, we have then compared this performance of Iranian industries with an ideal Index which we have constructed based on the average performance of the three developed industrialized economies of USA, Germany and Japan. The result shows that not only productivity and efficiency of Iranian manufacturing industries are very low in almost all the branches in absolute terms, but also inefficiency are more pronounced when compared with our estimated ideal Index. Our disaggregation of efficiencies performance also shows that in almost all industrial branches allocative inefficiency is much higher than technical inefficiencies, indicating that , government macroeconomic mismanagement leads to inflationary pressures and high costs.