Effects of Iran's WTO Accession on the Cement Industry: A Dynamic Disequilibrium Adjustment Model (DDAM) of Simultaneous Equations

Abstract

Many companies around the globe are re-examining their business operations to explore profitable growth in international markets.The attractiveness of the membership in WTO can be recognized not only in the growing number of its members but also as a result of increasing access to potential markets around the world. Iranian economy suffers from huge inefficiency in its trade relationships with other countries due to import compression policy and strict import controls. Iran's import profile is heavily skewed towards those tradable that are not strongly under the effects of WTO, indicating protectionism policy in the industry sector. Besides the need for easing protectionism, the emphasis placed on the growth of non-oil exports and reducing oil dependency as an objective in the five-year development plans provides a strong argument for joining WTO. Measuring technical efficiency in the cement industry in Iran suggests that companies with export-orientation policy have potentials to succeed in increasing their technical efficiency.The new discovering realm of WTO for Iran's trade policy has been evaluated in this paper. The pros and cons for joining induced us to investigate the effects of Iran's membership on the cement industry. By designing a dynamic disequilibrium adjustment model (DDAM), we use annual data for the period 1963-2002 to estimate a simultaneous system of econometric equations including cement supply, exports, imports, and consumption functions in order to quantify the effects of joining on the cement industry of Iran. One of the main challenges confronting the Iranian cement industry is to improve the competitiveness of the industry by reducing the subsidies, removing restrictions, and price controls. Indeed, the experience of other counties after joining WTO portrays a conflicting profile on the effects of accession on domestic economies. While some countries have developed important trading partners, others have suffered due to the loss of domestic industries. In this paper, we intend to examine the hypothesis of whether reducing the tariff rates will promote Iranian cement industry. The results reveal that joining WTO has negligible effects on consumption, production, and exports, though, will raise imports substantially.