Sharif Digital Repository

Like many of the world's large-scale terminal lakes, the Urmia saltwater lake in northwestern Iran is undergoing a process of desiccation. The anticipated economic, social, environmental and health consequences of this are daunting. We set out to examine the policies that have been designed in response to the lake crisis in the past twenty years. We focus on the set of measures proposed by the Urmia Lake Restoration Program (ULRP) and explain why their impact on water savings are overstated while the potentially most effective measures are abandoned. We then discuss the various social, institutional and political factors that have led to this state of affairs. Identifying and understanding... 

The capital intensive network industries such as electricity and gas delivery infrastructures exhibit natural monopoly characteristics because of their high economy of scale relative to the size of the market. Due to the absence of direct competition in these regulated industries, infrastructure providers hardly undertake the appropriate level of innovation activities to optimise the operation and continuity of their services; a review is provided to show how different countries support innovation in the network industries. As innovation activities are costly and risky undertakings, a relevant query is how to incentivise innovation through economic regulations. This paper models three... 

With the outbreak of the coronavirus in countries around the world, governments have decided to impose restrictions and social distancing. Closures of businesses, and hence changes in supply and demand patterns during this period, have deepened concerns among policy makers. In this article, we investigate the change in primary energy consumption in the 20 European countries that have the highest GDP. To this end, 10 different shock scenarios and its limitations are considered. By implementing these shocks into input-output modelling, changes in primary energy consumption are calculated. The results show that according to the best scenario (rapid and complete economy restoration), Russia with... 

With the outbreak of the coronavirus in countries around the world, governments have decided to impose restrictions and social distancing. Closures of businesses, and hence changes in supply and demand patterns during this period, have deepened concerns among policy makers. In this article, we investigate the change in primary energy consumption in the 20 European countries that have the highest GDP. To this end, 10 different shock scenarios and its limitations are considered. By implementing these shocks into input-output modelling, changes in primary energy consumption are calculated. The results show that according to the best scenario (rapid and complete economy restoration), Russia with... 

This paper examines the effect of experiencing a research collaboration between African scientists and their international partners on the African scientists' research impact, measured by scores based on the number of citations and journal impact factor. Using a difference-in-difference regression analysis on publication data of African scientists, the results show that international research collaboration in a given year has a positive and significant effect on research impact, which lasts in the subsequent years. The presence of such permanent effect suggests a sort of 'permanent learning by international collaboration'. The positive effect of international collaboration on research... 

The importance of scientific collaborations is mainly because of the professional learning obtained from the formation of research connections. Each researcher brings a feature and advantage to the research team, such as mastering a particular topic and its subdivisions or improving team thinking. The importance of collaboration is doubled when researchers collaborate at the international level, resulting in access to up-to-date resources and equipment, consequently increasing the quantity, quality, and impact of research activities. The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of international collaboration of faculty members on the centrality of the university network... 

Iran is situated in a wind belt. However, the installed wind capacity in Iran is around 300 MW, which is minuscule compared with the global 651 GW capacity as of 2021. Using novel data from wind trackers across Iran, the paper’s findings show immense potential for wind energy in Iran from a technical perspective. While attractive policies are already in place to incentivize wind energy development in Iran, the feed-in tariff (FiT) for wind energy has dropped to around 3 cents per kWh because of the sharp depreciation of the Iranian rial between 2018 and 2020. This paper shows that there is no economic justification for the development of wind farms in Iran at such low FiTs. A minimum FiT of... 

The COVID-19 disease has serious economic consequences in all countries of the world. In this paper, the impact of the pandemic on gross domestic product (GDP) and the value-added of Iranian economic sectors is simulated based on input-output analysis. The delay caused by the pandemic will not necessarily be compensated in the coming years, so it is important to understand the long-term impact of COVID-19 on the economy. Using Iran’s economy input-output tables produced by Iranian authorities, it is possible to measure the economy’s response to the COVID-19 shock. The nine shock scenarios are considered based on the Oxford Government Response Tracker to make the assumptions as close to... 

The theoretical model developed in this article predicts that collaboration with top-funded scientists positively affects the number of scientific publications of an individual scientist. Having combined data on funding and publication of Quebec scientists, this article empirically tests the theoretical predictions. This article examines numerous definitions of top-funded scientists as those in the top 10 per cent, or top 5 per cent in terms of total funding, funding from the public sector, and funding from the private sector. The results show that collaborating with such top-funded scientists has a positive effect on a scientist's number of publications, hence confirming our theoretical... 

Traditional regulatory models of natural monopoly network utilities are designed to incentivise cost-efficiency, subject to the firm achieving a certain level of reliability. With the rise of decarbonisation as a key policy goal, facilitating innovation in electricity networks has become of vital importance. Innovation and cost-efficiency may overlap and exhibit the same risk profile. However, we show that when there is a difference in their risk profile, incentivising these two tasks using the same incentive scheme is ineffective. This means incentive regulations need to be enhanced with additional modules that take into account the level of risk to which companies are exposed to for their... 

This paper studies the relationship between the position of individual scientists within co-authorship networks and their scientific performance. Using co-authorship data from African scientists in the Health and Medical Sciences within a timespan of 15 years (2000–2015), we characterize the collaboration networks and calculate centrality measures for each scientist to explore how scientific production and impact can be associated with their position within the network. Our findings reveal that authors who occupy a better position within their network and are deemed to actively collaborate with others also have a higher research impact. In this regard, South African scientists do not differ... 

Purpose: Adopting digital technology could facilitate the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some analysts argue that countries that adopted digital technology in their health sector have managed to control the virus better (Whitelaw et al., 2020). For instance, countries with more comprehensive contact tracing have significantly lower fatality rates (Yalaman et al., 2021). Moreover, World Health Organization (WHO) believes this technology is a crucial enabler for countries to meet the current challenge (WHO. Regional Office for the Western Pacific & University of Melbourne, 2021). In this regard, this study aims to quantitatively find the relationship between the technological... 

Hand in hand with the flourish of the biodiesel industry, glycerol (GLY) as an inconvenient by-product has generated environmental and sustainability concerns. Devising measures for efficient transformation of GLY into value-added products is a promising solution. In this contribution, the transformation of GLY to lactic acid (LA) as a valuable chemical was investigated in a continuous process for industrial applications. In this regard, a catalytic method using heterogeneous Cu nanoparticles in NaOH solution was studied in a microreactor by a CFD simulation. A seven-inlet micromixer comprising an optimized mixing unit was incorporated for uniform distribution of the species. The effects of... 

The groundwater system in the Rafsanjan aquifer perpetuated sustainably for decades before 1950s; however, its groundwater resources have been overexploited in the recent decades. In this paper, we aim to investigate the water governance system to understand the reasons behind the ongoing overexploitation. Sustainability processes are considered a policy implementation problematic. As such, we employ the contextual interaction theory as a policy implementation framework to assess the groundwater governance as part of the context for the conservation policy. Data for this qualitative research were gathered from legal texts, articles, technical reports, and multiple interviews with authorities... 

The current transition to a greener economy affects world markets dynamics. Given the considerable hydrocarbon dependency, we scrutinise the resilience of the Russian fiscal stance to international oil and gas prices at the first phase of this study. In doing so, we apply Cross-Quantilogram and Dynamic Simulated Autoregressive Distributed Lags (DSARDL) to analyse time-series data from January 2011 to August 2021. Our investigation demonstrates the fiscal stance (FS) positively responds to positive oil price shocks at medium quantile of FS and at lower to the higher quantile of oil price. The degree of responsiveness of FS to oil price is profound in the medium memory due to the time lag of...