Suchergebnisse

This volume explores Iran's industrial and trade policy options for achieving sustainable, export-oriented, and pro-employment growth. The first part of the book discusses Iran's economic and industrial development performance, as well as strategies for enhancing capabilities, fostering productive transformation, and developing employment that can result in faster and more inclusive economic growth. It also presents a case study on a leading manufacturing subsector--the automotive industry. The book then offers a set of analyses concerning the country's trade sector, including exchange rate policies, ways to connect to global markets, and accession to the World Trade Organization. In turn, the closing chapters investigate various aspects of Iran's labor market and offer policy recommendations on the creation of productive jobs. Readers will learn about effective industrial, trade, and employment policies that can complement macroeconomic measures adopted by the government. As such, the book will appeal not only to scholars and policy-makers, but also to international investors seeking to understand various core aspects of Iran's industrial and employment structures and trade regime.--

Purpose
By adopting a cultural lens, this study aims to conceptualize destination-community hospitality to capture societal hospitality at the destination as an intangible asset. Destination-community hospitality comprises a set of attitudes and traits that are organically conveyed by community members and directly experienced by tourists. The paper contributes to efforts aimed at freeing hospitality from the confines of commercial lodging and food and beverage establishments.


Design/methodology/approach
This study proposes an affection–attention–awareness (AAA) framework by drawing on the pertinent literature and leveraging the affective–behavioral–cognitive model of attitudinal change. It focuses on the effects of cognition in conceptualizing destination-community hospitality as the core of the framework. Methodologically, the framework is illustrated with qualitative data including observational fieldwork and interviews conducted in Iran.


Findings
Illustration of the AAA framework in the context of Iran highlights how welcoming attitudes are leveraged at a destination as an ingrained community mindset even in the absence of formal initiatives or professional training. It underscores the hospitality advocacy role of local-community members irrespective of public-sector policy and capacity deficiencies.


Practical implications
Destinations that strive to attract tourists should tap into the significant wealth of intuitive hospitality within communities as an intangible resource. The ingenuity should be preserved to sustainably enhance the overall tourist experiences. The framework can serve as a guide to strategically facilitate destination-community hospitality.


Originality/value
Research on community-wide hospitality at destinations, as a major cultural asset in the context of strategic hospitality management, remains underdeveloped. With illustrative evidence, the findings elevate the critical role of community members as innate advocates of hospitality in developing destinations. The proposed framework of destination-community hospitality provides a new perspective and impetus for investigating hospitality beyond commercial domains.

This study probes the middle class in Iran in relation to oil rents and political development. We begin by discussing how the Iranian middle class has evolved through the 1979 Revolution and in the post-revolutionary period. We then empirically examine the relationships among per capita oil-rent shocks, the growth of the middle class, and the quality of political institutions as well as political conflict. We use annual time series data for 1965-2012 and employ a Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model along with impulse response and variance decomposition analyses. According to our results, the middle class response to positive oil shocks is positive and significant. Yet, positive oil shocks and the growth of the middle class have contrary effects on the quality of political institutions in the short term - negative and positive respectively. This prompts us to employ a weighted measure of conflict, whose positive response to the growth of the middle class in Iran we then capture. These results are robust when controlling for other channels in the nexus of oil rents and middle class. The estimated Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) models illustrated the long-run effects of oil rents on the size of middle class and long-run effects of both middle class and oil rents on conflict. Our findings hint at potential conflicts after oil shocks, whereby oil rents increase government's control over political institutions but at the same time give impetus to the growth of the middle class that is in turn associated with political instability.