---

The Iranian electricity market is undergoing the first decade of restructuring. Effective competition in wholesale electricity market is a necessary feature of successful electricity industry restructuring. The paper examines the degree of competition in the Iranian electricity market during March to September 2009. The competitive benchmark analysis has been used to simulate producer’s behavior as a price taker firms and compare the competitive market results with actual market outcomes. The competitive benchmark has been calculated through generation costs of producers. Moreover, the possibility of execution market power has been considered by structural index. The finding indicates that the Iranian electricity market has a considerable potential to exercise power market and there were significant departure from competitive behavior during 2009.

---

  Environmental Kuznets Curve ( EKC) theory has evolved over several decades from its initial intuitive conception to the complex theoretical models of today. Through successive steps of empirical and theoretical debate, a quadratic relationship between income and environmental degradation has been proposed, criticized, defended, and criticized again.

  Along the way, each finding have new look at the subject. Critic that is provided by Mazzanti et al. (2007) and Stern (1998) is that instead of attempting to gain insight into the underlying mechanics of an EKC theoretical foundation, there are undue focus on exploring empirical regularities among a large set of variables. These critics from opponent and supporter cause researcher to review their approach and take more concerns on details and methodology of EKC theory that make the way of theoretical works.

In this paper, a microeconomics model is provided in which household confront with decision about consumption of dirty and clean goods. It is showed that household make decision in the way that, as income increases, environment pollution rise at first and then fall when household substitute dirty goods by clean goods.

---

Energy carrier’s subsidization has placed a significant pressure on government budget in Iran thus, energy price increase is performed in order to ameliorate this case. One of the main challenges that policymakers need to consider is the impact of energy prices increase on the labor market especially, when the national unemployment rate is high. This paper utilizes a computable general equilibrium model based on a Micro Consistent Matrix for 2006 in order to evaluate the impact of energy price increase on the Iranian labor market during 2006. The empirical results are based on two scenarios: Baseline and FOB price increase scenarios. They show that the activity level and demand for labor in “crude oil, natural gas, and coal” as well as “other services” sectors will increase in short-run while the energy carriers’ prices increase. However, in long-run, the labor increment will be lower. Furthermore, the model results indicate that in short-run, the activity level and demand for labor in the other sectors will decrease. On the other hand, the policy will result in a larger decrement in the activity level and demand for labor in these sectors in long-run.