Analysis of Rice Import Trend and it`s Economic Factors: Case of Iran

Rice comes second after wheat in iran`s food consumptioneconomy. however iran is one of the greatest rice importercountries all over the world because of it`s rising population andrecent growth in gdp. this paper presents an analysis of cointegrationtest between rice import and it`s economic factors overthe period 1990-2011, employing engle-granger model. at first,dickey-fuller test shows that all variables are non-stationary atdata level, so their first difference (that are stationary series) areused. secondly, engle-granger testing presents existence of along-run relationship between rice import and it`s economicfactors including per capita gdp, foreign exchange rate and domesticprice. at last, rice import model was estimated usingols method which proves that all independent variables aresignificant at high level and the sign of coefficients are consistentwith theoretical expectations so that import of rice positivelycorrelates with per capita gdp, domestic price and negativelycorrelates with foreigh exchange rate. with respect to increasingdemand for rice, government should keep domestic policies forthe rise of rice production so that the need for import falls in thelong-run.