Safdari Mehdi and Motiee Reza
In recent years, appropriate increase of production and production for saffron export has led to seeking new export markets in Iran. The purpose of this study is to determine the relationship between Saffron export and agricultural value added in Iran. The theoretical framework was designed based on this assumption that the total production in the economy is divided into two sections: production for inside and production for export. The data were collected from 1990 to 2007 and were analyzed using Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model. The result of the analyses showed that there was significant relationship between Saffron export and agricultural value added. Together the independent variables explained 91% of the variance in the dependent variables. The remaining 9% was due to unidentified variables. In relation to that, we can conclude that explanatory power is high for the equation. It showed that one percent change in Saffron export rate lead to 35% in agricultural value added growth. Therefore Saffron export is regarded as an important factor in Iran's agricultural value added.
