مطالب

Tourism development is considered an important tool in promoting economic growth, alleviating poverty, and advancing spirituality development. This paper aims to review the relationship between tourism and spirituality and to explain how tourism development could contribute to spirituality development goals. The paper provides an analysis of the relationship between tourism and spirituality development. It explores definitions and constructs of spirituality and reviews experiences and practices in relation to spiritual resources. However, by looking at a brief history of human intelligence we learned that there is a low agreement today upon the spirituality definition. In order to reach a broad agreement, the paper was divided into two sections. The first section explains the importance of tourism and spirituality as components of life success while the second section discusses some important issues regarding the development of spirituality through tourism activities by presenting a model that provides clarification, definition, and relations to the terms of faith, spirituality, religion and tourism. The model can serve as a means to begin the dialogue needed to increase understanding of this important concept. The paper also suggests that the ability to effectively develop tourism can strongly and positively influence spiritual principles and practices.

This paper uses monthly price indices of 448 items of manufacturing sector in 2004:4 to 2016:01, to study the effect of exchange rate and its volatilities on price setting behavior of manufacturing sectors. Given that, many manufacturing sectors in Iran need to import raw materials, intermediate and capital goods in their production process, it is expected that exchange rate variations affect price setting behavior indices (frequency and size of price changes) in various manufacturing sectors. The results show that an increase in the exchange rate and also an increase in the exchange rate volatility lead to an increase in the frequency of price changes. In addition, while the exchange rate, itself, does not affect the size of price changes, the exchange rate volatility negatively affects the size of price changes. That is, manufacturers’ response to the exchange rate increase is limited to an increase in the frequency of price changes, but an increase in the exchange rate volatility increases the frequency of price changes and decreases the size of price changes. Also, the frequency of price changes in manufacturing sectors with high level of competitiveness and low level of raw material inventory is positively affected by the exchange rate increase.

In addition to traditional factors, demographic changes also depend on factors such as marriage and divorce. Yet only a few researchers investigated the impact of divorce on housing costs. The aim of this paper is to estimate the effect of divorce on housing costs in Iran. Doing so, we have applied a fixed Panel Spatial Autocorrelation model using the data from a set of Iranian provinces over the period of 2006-2014. The results indicate that a one-percent point rise in divorce increases housing rental index by about 1.05% point directly and indirectly. The outcomes also show that household size has a negative and significant effect, but the per capita gross domestic product and the population have positive and significant effects on the housing rental index. On average, a one-percent point increase in the housing rental index of any provinces will increase the housing rental index in a province by about 0.34 percentage points.

In the present study, the effect of concluding and executing monetary treaties as well as membership of regional economic cooperation organizations (as a potential for using regional currency) on mutual exports between Iran and its 50 major trading partners during the period of 2000 to 2016 is investigated. The Generalized Commercial Gravity Model and Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression of panel data with fixed effects are used. Countries' exports to each other are considered as dependent variables, and economic weight (log ratio of countries' GDP based on the purchasing power parity to each other), geographic distance between countries, real effective exchange rate and the degree of openness of the economy are independent explanatory variables. In addition, monetary treaties and the membership of the countries in the Asian Clearing Union, in the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) and in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) are considered as dummy variables. The results show a positive and significant relationship between monetary treaties and the volume of exports of countries to each other. Also, the coefficients of dummy variables are significant and negative, indicating the lack of potential for the use of regional common currency among 51 countries over the considered period.

Development of e-banking has empirically modified the structure and characters of banks’ performance, efficiency, risk and challenges which have also been articulately recognized based on the international best practices. E-banking brazenly accelerates and restructures financial transactions via enhancing technology and expanding the banking services in comparison with conventional banking. Accordingly, online access to the banks’ products, financial statements, payment services and even credit scoring has considerably improved banks-customers relationships in the context of lending and borrowing practice, deposit composition, investment opportunities, trade finance options as well as account management diversification. The impact of recent e-banking developments is statistically evaluated for Iran’s banking network via Dynamic Panel Data approach. The findings highlight that the ratio of ATMs and Electronic Cards transactions to banks' assets negatively-significantly influence the profitability due to higher substitution ratio with the other payment instruments and maintenance cost. The ratio of online branch transactions to the banks' assets negatively-insignificantly affects the profitability owing to the rapid increase in the NPLs and loan/loss expenses which has consequently shrunk Shared Revenues over the past 10 years. SWIFT-branches have positively-significantly enhanced the banks internal-secured cash flow while contemporaneously improves fund efficiency, banks’ services fees, and ultimately profit margin.

In this paper Basel regulation is modeled in Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) framework. For this purpose, using data from 1981-2017 for Iran, capital adequacy as an importance regulation is modeled. Results show Basel regulation has procyclical effect. According to the results of the model and according to the realities of economy and banking system of Iran, in recession, lending and credit risk increase and repayment probability decrease. Despite these conditions, capital adequacy does not increase. This confirms that risks are less relevant in determining capital. If elasticity of repayment probability with respect to capital loan ratio is zero, Basel II is more procyclical than Basel I. If elasticity of repayment probability with respect to capital loan ratio is 0.5, Basel II is less procyclical than Basel I.