Sharif Digital Repository

The process of preparing and enacting a bio1safety law in Iran lasted more than a decade. This paper examines the process of biosafety policy-making in Iran in relation to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (CPB) and to domestic Iranian factors. While some scholars argued that the CPB would be influential in developing countries, our findings indicate that it was not particularly important in Iranian biosafety legislation. This paper outlines the internal Iranian political processes, which initially envisaged a very precautionary approach, but which concluded with a biosafety law designed to promote the adoption of these technologies. Reference will be made to the changing influence of... 

Purpose: This study aim to examine the roots of professional resistance of procurement in Iran. Public procurement (PP) contracts, in developing countries, hide the structural problems of governmental management because of the lack of bureaucratic processes. Design/methodology/approach: A two-phase qualitative study offers contextual and critical understandings on why Iranian PP experts, who are aware of the philosophies behind internationally endorsed principles, prefer to resist against the use of those principles. They help, unexpectedly, their traditionalist companions to resolve the difficulties of the PP contracts by the use of local methods and routines. Findings: Evidence, from... 

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to estimate long-run elasticities for housing prices in Tehran's (capital of Iran) 20 different zones relative to several explanatory variables available for use such as land price, total substructure area, material price, etc. Moreover, another goal of this paper is to propose a new approach to deal with problems which arise due to a lack of proper data. Design/methodology/approach: The data set is gathered from "The Municipality of Tehran" and "The Central Bank of Islamic Republic of Iran (CBI)". One-way fixed effects and one-way random effects approaches (which are panel data approaches) are applied to model housing price forecasting function in... 

The present study is a nationwide survey of language identity among English language learners in Iran. The participants who completed the survey in this research included 1851 English language learners from different parts of the country who belonged to different genders, age groups and English language proficiency levels. The main instrument was a validated questionnaire which included 19 items and was administered online and by hand. The results of this survey revealed that Iranian English language learners had a moderate level of language identity and there was no significant difference between the language identity of male and female participants. In addition, the results indicated that... 

Bibliometric, and scientometric approaches are used to provide appropriate tools for evaluating scientific products at local, national, and international levels. Iran, the same as other countries, has many universities and research centers in the field of engineering that Iran's most of the scientific products account for the field of engineering. This study is a descriptive approach using scientometric methods. is The present paper mainly focuses on visualizing the structure of the Iranian scientific publications in the field of engineering indexed in Thomson Reuters (ISI) accessible via WoS during 1939-2011. To draw the historiographical map of Iranian scientific outputs in the field of... 

This study investigated Iranian language students' perception of and familiarity with plagiarism, their attitudes toward their professors regarding this issue, and their reasons for doing so. The participants were 122 undergraduate and graduate language students in Translation, Literature, TEFL, and Linguistics who filled out a validated and piloted questionnaire. Overall, the results indicated that students had different views about the definition of plagiarism and plagiarism was mostly perceived by students as using someone else's words as if they were their own rather than taking someone's ideas without permission. It was also found that in their academic career, students mostly consider... 

In this paper, an analysis is presented of some bronze vessels from recent excavations at the first millennium BC site of Sangtarashan in eastern Luristan, Iran, according to metallography (OM), ICP-OES and SEM-EDS methods to identify alloying as well as manufacturing processes. This study provides new evidence for a better understanding of the bronze archaeometallurgy during the Iron Age in Iran. It concludes that the artifacts contain homogenous and single phase tin bronze (Cu-Sn) alloy. The Sn content in the artifacts also allowed to apply mechanical operations on the vessels without causing brittleness. Apart from tin, other elements that are classified as trace elements were present,... 

Load-associated fatigue cracking is one of the major distress types occurring in flexible pavement systems. This paper identifies two important calibration factors for the dry-no freeze climatic region of Iran for use in the Mechanistic Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG). According to recent research, approximately 51~% of Iran's total land area is located in this region. Tehran, the capital of Iran, is located in this region and therefore three of its highways are selected for this research. The gathering of the data required for calibration is labor intensive because the data resides in various incongruent data sets. Spreadsheet templates specifically designed to manage the... 

For the 4th IUPAP International Conference of Women in Physics, we report on activities in science and engineering in Iran, and conditions for women in physics, in the three years since the 3rd IUPAP International Conference of Women in Physics was held in 2008. Iran has made prominent advancements and astonishing progress in laser technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, genetics, computer software and hardware, and robotics. Iranian scientists have been very productive in several experimental fields, such as pharmaceutical, organic, and polymer chemistry. Conditions for women in physics have improved greatly in recent years. A project to improve the environment for learning physics, and... 

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to study brain drain as a social problem and elaborate a five-dimensional social justice model as the main cause of brain drain. The paper explores the effects of distributional justice, emotional justice, procedural justice, transactional justice, and informational justice on brain drain intention. Design/methodology/approach: The method of research is survey method. This research is functional in terms of target and is descriptive. Moreover, the research is a field study from the information gathering perspective; and from the aspect of relationship between variables, it has casual type. Findings: The results of this study demonstrate that justice is a... 

Economists and policy-makers believe that the Fiscal Decentralization is an effective strategy to promote economic growth. Thereby Economic Growth is seen as an objective of Fiscal Decentralization and efficiency in the allocation of resources in the public sector. This study analyzed the relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth in Iran for the period 2001-2007.We used data for 28 provinces of the country estimated the model using a panel data regression with Fixed Effect. We find that fiscal decentralization has a positive effect on Iran's economic growth  

This paper aims to estimate a demand model for health insurance and medical care in Iran, in the presence of heterogeneous and latent health status of individuals; moreover it tests the asymmetry of information in the health insurance market. Our data set have been taken from the Households expenditures survey (2006) of Iran. Parameters of the model are estimated by the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) and the presence of asymmetric information (adverse selection and moral hazard) is tested by a non-parametric econometric method. The analytical model is specified under minimal assumptions on the selection process of different insurance categories and the statistical distribution of... 

This paper aims to find the causal structure among the criteria of European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) excellence model in the organisations of the healthcare sector to prioritise improvement actions for excellence in hospitals. In this regard, a framework of relations among the criteria of EFQM model is developed by theoretical studies and then, this framework is tested based on the results of self-evaluations performed in Iran public hospitals using the Structural Equation Modelling statistical technique. The required data have been collected from 40 public hospitals from 30 provinces and more than 1200 senior and middle managers of clinical departments of the Iran healthcare... 

Biodiesel is an attractive renewable energy in Iran. However, the concerns for food security, emissions, and water requirement move us towards developing the analytical framework to study emission-water nexus of biodiesel via the multi objective sustainable planning of biodiesel supply chain. Here, the literature of biodiesel in Iran is comprehensively reviewed and main issues are discussed. Then, a supply chain planning model is applied to depict the optimal path ways to minimize costs, net emission, and water use in Iran during 25 years. The microalgae via open ponds and jatropha cultivation reduce the total costs and improve negative emissions. The jatropha optimizes the water use and... 

Iran has been experiencing slow growth for the past ten years. Using plant-level information, we show that on average firm-specific productivity in manufacturing sectors declined at the rate of 2.6 percent annually, while large top decile firms experienced a modest growth in productivity between 2005 and 2011. We decompose this trend and find that within-plant variation is its main driving force while the between firms and industries component is insignificant. We test several alternative explanations that may contribute to these negative trends. We show that the subsidy reform had a negative effect, while privatization seems to have had no effect. Private management not affected on... 

Purpose - The aim of this paper is to look at the relationship between research in Iranian medical universities, together with their Web Impact Factor (WIF). Design/methodology/approach - The Altavista search engine was chosen because of its advanced search facilities for counting links and having a wider scope of academic web sites than other search engines. It was searched for determining the number of pages, in-links and self-links of 42 web sites of Iranian medical universities. The Web Impact Factor (WIF) was calculated by two formulas and the relationship between the two grades of universities (WIF and ISI) was calculated by using the Spearman's correlation coefficient. Findings -... 

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to determine why female labor force participation in Iran has been less than 20 percent. Design/methodology/approach: The authors estimate a structural dynamic matching model of female participation using individual panel data in Iran. The study incorporates many factors such as wage, child cost, education, spouse employment and job market search parameters. Findings: The study finds that gender discrimination in job finding has the biggest effect in reducing the rate of women's participation. If all market differences disappear, the female participation rate will increase by 12 percentage points to almost 27 percent, which is still much lower than that... 

This article analyzes various roles of development practitioners (called outsiders) in five different cases of community-based development (CBD) in rural Iran. It provides a review of the literature on CBD and identifies three main types of roles fulfilled by outsiders to support indigenous development processes. These include preparing the ground, activating community-based organizations as participatory institutions, and taking on the role of brokers who bridge the gap between the local community and outside institutions—especially the state and market. From the analysis of empirical qualitative data collected during fieldwork in Iran, the article concludes that while the roles played by... 

It is often assumed that there is a confrontation between science and Islam, especially in religious communities. Biological evolution is often one of the constant sources of contention due to its metaphysical implications. Although there are some empirical data showing low acceptance of evolution and understanding its basic principles in Sunni-majority countries, there has been a categorical lack of data about Iran as the most influential Shiite-majority state. Therefore, in order to reach a better understanding of the culture and world-view of Iranians, we implemented two established questionnaires and phone interviews to assess educated Iranians’ attitude toward evolution. We reach an... 

This study developed a groundwater sustainable management index including components of environmental, social, economic and institutional responsibility. Four significant indicators: integrated groundwater footprint, population density, percentage of groundwater used for agricultural and industrial sectors, and density of observation wells were adopted and executed for 443 of Iran’s aquifers. The results indicated that the groundwater sustainable management for 32% of Iran’s aquifers is poor–very poor, and this index is more sensitive to economic and social indicators. Finally, an inverse correlation was observed between the groundwater sustainable management index values and the coefficient...