چکیده:
Rent-seeking in the trade sector is an outcome of restrictions imposed on tariffs and import quotas by a government. In an effort to acquire more privilege in foreign trade, labor allocates a part of its time-effort to rent-seeking activity, while cutting down on production work. Given the importance of rent-seeking activity due to restrictions imposed by the government in the Iranian economy, this paper has attempted to calculate the size of rent-seeking activity in the foreign trade sector of the Iranian economy. Hence, a version of the DSGE model has been specified and the related parameters have been estimated in order to calculate the rent-seeking rate. We have applied quarterly data from 1998:1 to 2015:4 for Iran’s trade sector, to obtain the empirical results through calibrating the specified DSGE model. The results have indicated that rent-seeking of Iran’s trade sectors amounted to 0.45, which looks considerably high. Moreover, labor has shared 24 % of its effort time to rent-seeking activity and 76 % to ordinary work.
خلاصه ماشینی:
"The innovation of the model is thus the revenue from trade restrictions is spent on government financing, but an individual uses a part of them that means each he/she allocates fraction of effort time to rent- seeking (versus ordinary activity).
Therefore, the government trade revenues from imposition of restrictions such as tariffs were inserted into the model to calculate the allocation of labor effort time to rent-seeking and earn more privilege under DSGE.
4. The Empirical Model According to the theory of the model discussed in the previous section, the maximization of consumer utility function under budget constraint yields several equations, including real money balance demand, labor supply, Standard Euler, capital rent rate equation and nominal return on bonds for a period of household portfolio decisions.
As the objective of this study has been to measure the extent of rent- seeking activity (qt ) in Iran’s external economic sector, the DSGE model has been specified to include trade income (tariff revenue was used as a proxy1), where the trade rent-seeking rate (q ) , a share of labor productive work (mt H t ) and a share of rent-seeking activity ((1- mt )Ht ) have been calculated.
In other words, Labor acquires a share of 45 percent from trade income (rent) by allocating 24 percent of its effort time to rent-seeking and 76 percent to productive activity, which is considered a high portion for Iran' economy."