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Economic integration is considered as a policy by which trade barriers should be relaxed gradually or disappear fully among members of a trading block. Integration arrangements are implemented to make economic policies beneficial to members in order to strengthen their economic relations. In principle, integration refers to unified monetary, financial and trade policies that countries of an economic :::union::: have agreed upon. Applying the panel data model to the gravity theory, this paper examines the effects of trade integration on trade flows between Iran and selected economic blocks over the period of 1992-2003. The results obtained imply that trade integration between Iran and the economic blocks like the European :::union::: (EU), PGCC, D8 and East Asian countries can lead to trade creation, while the trade intensities of the EU-Iran and East Asia-Iran are more pronounced than those of the others.

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The new theories available in the international trade emphasize on the synchronization of economic fluctuations arising from trade integration and multilateral trade flows among countries. This paper verifies this relationship among 56 Islamic countries classifying into the three major blocks: D8, GCC and ECO. The empirical results obtained by this research, through measuring different indexes, show a pronounced and significant relationship between trade integration and the synchronization of economic fluctuations among these countries during 1990-2005, in particular. Further more the result show that regional block arrangements play significant roles to integrate trade and synchronize business cycles in the OIC nations. In comparison, the highest synchronization is found among the D8 member countries.

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Considering the process of globalization and the importance of trade and foreign direct investment, the effects of the trade openness of countries and attraction mechanism of foreign direct investments to domestic investment and economic growth during 1980-2008 has been studied in 10 Asian developing countries in this paper. In order to estimate the model the GMM model and panel data method with fixed effects has been used dynamically. Results show that domestic investment, foreign direct investment, trade openness and human capital have had positive and significant effect on economic growth in these countries, but inflation and financial development have had negative and significant effect on economic growth. Also, they indicate that economic growth, foreign direct investment and financial development have had positive and significant effect on domestic investment in these countries, but trade openness has had negative and significant effect on the level of investment in these countries during selected time span

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Predicting currency fluctuations and crises is an important step in the foreign exchange policy of countries. Given that the purpose of early warning systems or patterns is to anticipate crises, their use is essential to prevent economic crises, including currency crises. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to model and rank the early warning factors of currency crisis by Bayesian averaging method. For this purpose, 70 variables warning of the currency crisis during the period 1970-2018 for the most important trading partners of Iran that have experienced the currency crisis in floating and non-floating currency systems are examined. Selective warning variables include a wide range of macroeconomic variables and financial variables that reflect the state of the economy in the real, monetary, political, public, foreign, institutional, and structural sectors. The results of this study show that the designed system has a high ability to predict currency crises in the period under review and identify the most important warning factors. Overall, the results indicate that considering the currency governance system in the models of currency crisis warning, sometimes different variables are introduced as currency crisis warning; So that changes in foreign exchange market pressure, changes in real effective exchange rates, the ratio of international reserves to foreign debt, real GDP growth and the percentage of foreign direct investment to GDP in the floating exchange rate system and changes in foreign exchange market pressure, Inflation, real effective exchange rate changes, the ratio of international reserves to GDP, and the ratio of exports of goods and services to GDP in the non-floating system are important warning indicators.