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Aim: Aging is a process that involves all living creatures, including human beings. Statistical indicators show that the aging trend is progressing in Iran, too. The volunteer women cooperating with the urban areas’ health system (called Healthy Volunteers) are amongst the pioneers and symbols of health care social participation.
Methods: This cross-sectional study was performed on 86 elderly members of the healthy volunteer group of health centers. Data collection instruments consisted of demographic information and LEIPAD questionnaires. Data were analyzed using SPSS18 and descriptive and analytic statistics.
Findings: The mean age of the participants was 64±4.007 years. The mean total score of QOL was 72.7±11.32. The mean score of the seven dimensions of QOL was as follows: physical function (71.5%), self-care (92.4%), social function (76.7%), anxiety and depression (82.8%), life satisfaction (67.9%), sexual function (71.5%) and cognitive function (78.9%). There was no significant relationship between QOL the variables such as age, educational level, marital status and number of family members (P>0.05). However, the relationship between QOL and the duration of elderly cooperation was significant (r=0.23, P<0.05).
Conclusion: The results showed that the quality of life in healthy volunteers was moderate. Therefore, health volunteers as elderly persons are role models and can take effective steps in the transfer of health information in the community.

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There are many factors affecting economic growth. Based on the literature, the effects of these factors such as higher education are mainly examined using endogenous economic growth theories. Various theoretical models are used to estimate the relation among variables affecting economic growth. This paper investigates the effects of higher education human capital on the economic growth in Iran using the endogenous growth models. The specified model includes human capital, physical investment and foreign debt which are identified as the main determinants of economic growth in Iran. Two dummy variables are included in the model in order to represent the effects of Islamic revolution and imposed war. The Johnson five steps approach is employed to estimate the empirical model. The results confirm that higher education human capital has a relatively large and statistically significant effect on the economic growth in Iran. It is found that the growth elasticity of higher education human capital is larger than the growth impact of physical capital investment. So, in order to obtain a high rate of economic growth in the country, investment in higher education human capital must be increased. Moreover, based on the findings, it is recommended that the investment should be made using domestic saving instead of financing abroad.

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By a transient glance at the Iranian government budget, it is found that in almost all years, a large amount of the Iranian government budget deficit is provided by issuing money. Money issuing through inflation and real economic growth, leads to increased revenue for the government. Through increasing the general level of prices and decreasing the purchasing power it leads to the concept of “inflation tax” which is taken from people without their awareness. By real economic growth, more real balance will be demanded for transaction of additional production. In such a condition, the government by paying credit money takes the possession of the goods and services which have inherent value. Regarding the importance of growth in macroeconomic discussions, in this study, the relationship between seigniorage and per capita income growth by using econometrics models has been analyzed. Using time series data for 1966 – 2007 the econometric models have been estimated through CLS approach and threshold level of seigniorage is assessed. The results show that seigniorage has meaningful and negative effect on the economic growth at more than 3.5% but its effect on economic growth less than 3.5% is neutral.

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Achieving a high and sustainable economic growth has always been the main target of economic plans in different countries. Proving a positive relationship between financial development and economic growth by many studies has convinced the researchers to study the effective factors on the growth and development of financial markets. Inflation is one of the main factors that have a great impact on the countries’ financial development. So, the focus in the studies has mainly been on explaining the form of relationship between inflation and financial development. In this paper, the relationship between inflation and financial market development in Iran during 1978 to 2007 for the money market and during the summer of 1999 to spring of 2008 for the capital market has been reviewed. Econometric model of this research has been specified according to Boyd, Levine and Smith model (2001). Firstly, a simple linear model is used for controlling other economic factors that may be correlated with financial market performance. Then, a threshold regression is handled for explaining the nonlinear relationship between inflation and financial market development. In this model, different thresholds that limit inflation are considered. Conditional least squares method (CLS), is applied for estimating the model. The threshold limit for inflation has been determined based on the minimum error sum of squared criterion. The results of the estimated model indicate that a negative relationship between inflation and financial development indexes of money market. This positive relationship also exists between inflation and stock market development indexes. In the same way, the output of the estimated models has shown that in the some domain of inflation, the negative relationship between inflation and financial development indexes of money market is not significant.  In addition, the results of the estimated models revealed that there is no a threshold limit for the impact of inflation on the stock market.  

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The prevalence of electronic money has affected the volume of banknotes and coins in circulation in Iran. This paper aims to study and analyses the mechanism of e-money impacts on currency volume. In this regard, the effects of e-money issuance and development indicators, such as number of debit cards, number of ATM machines, number of Point of Sales (POS) terminals, number of terminals in bank branches, on the volume of banknotes and coins in circulation are estimated using quarterly data during 2004-2010. The estimation results show that the increase in the number of debit cards raises the volume of currency in circulation. This arises since the debit cards are often used to get money for daily and weekly purchases from ATM machines in Iran. In addition, the number of Point of Sales has a negative effect on the volume of currency in circulation.  

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Rapid increase in housing price has been a national difficulty for the people and public officials in recent years in Iran. Therefore, the study of factors affecting increased housing prices is of great importance. In this paper, the effects of some key variables, including land price, construction cost, the volume of bank loans to housing sector, exchange rate, stock price index, the number of residential buildings and household income on the price of housing have been studied in Kermanshah. For analyzing the effects of above-mentioned variables on price of houses, an auto regressive distributed lag model has been estimated using quarterly data over the period 1991-2009. Additionally, the error correction model was estimated in order to evaluate the adjustment speed of dynamic model to the long-run one. The estimation results indicate that the macroeconomic variables are of high power in explaining the behavior of house price and its fluctuations.

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Inefficiency and injustice of subsidy system in Iran over the years induced the government to implement targeted subsidy law since 2010. As a result, the share of poor households receiving government subsidies decreased. Utilizing the micro-data of Households’ Income and Expenditure Surveys (HIES) from 2005 to 2014 and applying seemingly unrelated regression(SUR) technique through feasible generalized least squares (FGLS) method, this study examines the effect of targeting subsidies on households’ consumption combination. The results show that the shares of necessary goods in households’ expenditure have increased. According to Engle theory, these indicate reductions in households’ welfare. In addition, the “subsidy” dummy variable has the most effect on food expenditure share among different goods groups. One reason for the welfare reduction is higher increase in relative prices compared to increase in income due to subsidy. Since, the permanent income is of the highest effect on allocation of households’ budget among different goods groups; therefore, policy makers should focus on increase in the households’ real permanent income instead of inflationary policies, which increase nominal cash subsidies.

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The extent of masonry structures and their weaknesses against earthquakes will increase the need for research on new ways of seismic rehabilitation of these structures. Recently, in addition to conventional techniques such as Mesh, Shotcrete, and FRP, new materials such as ECC materials have been considered by the researchers to retrofit the masonry walls. The composite materials of cement base, which is one of the types of cement base materials, due to the presence of fibers in the matrix, has a significantly different tensile strain capacity than that of conventional concrete, so that the range of this parameter for a typical mortar is 0.015%, and for composite materials of ECC is from 0.5 up to 6%. In the present study, the effect of these materials on the performance of the bearing masonry walls with in-plane failure modes including the diagonal tension mode (brittle mode) and the bed-joint sliding mode (the ductile mode) were investigated. The results of the research are based on the numerical method. ABAQUS software was used for numerical modeling. Due to validate the model, the available laboratory information of as-built masonry walls has been used. The as-built masonry walls are half scale. The wall dimensions for diagonal tension mode and bed-joint sliding mode were 1900x1400x110 and 2700x1400x160 mm, respectively. The gravity load of the wall was 0.1 MP. The walls strengthened with 20 mm ECC layers on one and both sides. In one case, ECC layers were joint to the foundation and in other case were not. A change in failure mode of strengthened walls (brittle to ductile) and hardening behavior were the main achievement of this research. If the connection between ECC layers and the foundation is absent, the failure mode of strengthened walls will be toe-crushing and rocking mode. If the connection between ECC layers and the foundation is present, the failure mode of strengthened walls will be toe-crushing and bed-joint sliding mode. Other obtained results showed an effective increase in strength and dissipated energy. The extent of this increase depends on how ECC layer is connected to the foundation. If there is no connection between ECC layers and the foundation, the strength and dissipated energy of walls with diagonal tension failure mode for one-side and both-sides ECC layers will be 2.3 and 3 times, respectively, in comparison with those of as-built masonry walls. Whereas for the bed-joint sliding mode, the extent of wall strength and dissipated energy is 1.4 and 1.8. according to the obtained results and comparing the properties of the wall strengthened by one-side and both- sides ECC layers, a significant difference was not observed, especially in bed-joint sliding mode. Appositively, if there is a connection between ECC layers and the foundation, the strength of walls for one-side and both-sides ECC layers will be 3.5 and 6 times, respectively, in comparison with those of as-built masonry walls. Whereas the dissipated energy of walls will be 3 and 4.5 times. Based on these results, if the ECC layers and the wall foundation are connected, the capacity of strengthened walls will be optimized.

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The study investigated the toxicity of Parthenium extracts in comparison with Neem extracts against 3^rd and 4^th instar larvae of the diamondback moth, Plutella xylostella L.. The side effect of Parthenium extracts was also examined against larval parasitoid, Cotesia plutellae. Extracts obtained from their respective plants were dissolved independently to get stock solutions, which were further diluted to different concentrations (1%, 2%, and 3%) with distilled water. The experiment was laid out in completely randomized design with four treatments, including the control, and replicated six times in vitro. Results showed that Parthenium crude extracts was very effective in comparison with the control against P. xylostella, whilst the highest mortality was recorded at 3% concentration of Neem in comparison with Parthenium extracts against both stages of P. xylostella. Overall, the highest mortality was recorded at 3% concentration of Neem extracts followed by 2% Neem extracts, 3% Parthenium extracts, 1% neem, 2% and 1% Parthenium extracts. The lowest mortality was noted in the control (i.e. 70%, 58.33%, 51.67%, 35%, 33.33%, 18.33% and 16.67% in case of 3^rd instar mortality whilst 61.67%, 50%, 41.67%, 30%, 16.67% and 15% in case of 4^th instar mortality, respectively). Less harmful effect was observed for larval parasitoid, C. plutellae. Finally, it was concluded that all the treatments had the ability to control P. xylostella to some extent, but Parthenium crude extract was less efficient in comparison with Neem extract, as 3% crude extract of Neem had a sufficiently toxic effect on the P. xylostella.
 

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