Pooya Alaedini

University of Tehran | UT · Department of Planning for Social Welfare

Purpose: By adopting a cultural lens, this study aims to conceptualize destination-community hospitality to capture societal hospitality at the destination as an intangible asset. Destination-community hospitality comprises a set of attitudes and traits that are organically conveyed by community members and directly experienced by tourists. The pap...

Introduction: The potentials of housing provision in deteriorated urban zones as part of the Iranian government’s national housing programs (e.g., national housing initiative and now national housing movement) has attracted the attention of policymakers. Yet, little action has been taken so for to realize such potentials. The Tehran Municipality ha...

This paper advances the concept of mutual path dependence by investigating the new-town and low-income housing initiatives in Iran. Seventeen new towns have been established in the country. Many of them have additionally become major sites for Iran’s low-income housing scheme. The study employs a flexible approach to policy research to assess the t...

This paper investigates the effect of oil revenues on the middle-class size and income in Iran. Following Kharas (2017. The unprecedented expansion of the global middle class: An update. The Brookings Institution), it uses an absolute measure to define the middle class as those who earn between US$11 and US$110 per day (2011 PPP). The study employs...

Persistent upheavals in Afghanistan since 1978 have resulted in the exodus of a large number of its citizens, with neighboring Iran and Pakistan becoming host to most of these forced migrations. According to Iran’s census figures, there were 1,452,513 documented Afghans living in the country in 2011. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugee...

The Middle East is currently facing one of its most critical migration challenges, as the region has become the simultaneous producer of and host to the world’s largest population of displaced people. As a result of ongoing conflicts, particularly in Syria, Libya, Iraq, and Yemen, there have been sharp increases in the numbers of the internally dis...

Service quality in tourism and hospitality is intimately connected to human resources, which can be cultivated by enhancing workforce skills through training. This chapter probes challenges faced by the expanding tourism higher education in Mashhad, Iran. This growth, partly related to the current or potential development of the industry, is also a...

A simple strategic marketing framework is developed based on responsiveness to purposes of travel. It entails identifying purposes of visit associated with a specific destination for potential tourists, shaping tourism development policy decisions based on them, and attracting tourists by directly fulfilling their wishes. Its focus is on what a des...

Following a discussion of Iran’s employment and non-oil export aspirations, we are prompted in this chapter to estimate a set of translog cost and production functions for the country’s four-digit ISIC manufacturing subsectors to derive economies of scale and total factor productivity. We also extract subsector efficiencies using a stochastic front...

This chapter probes labor market developments for those with tertiary-level education in Iran as well as challenges and prospects for their increased employment through the country’s Sixth Economic, Social, and Cultural Development Plan. Given the large supply of labor with college/university education in the next few years, the manufacturing secto...

This introductory chapter of the volume starts out by discussing how increasing oil export revenues in the late 1960s and early 1970s allowed the Iranian government to embark on an industrialization drive through both facilitation of private-sector activities and direct initiatives. This strategy associated economic development above all with rapid...

This chapter treats the development of Iran’s auto industry. Through cooperation with European and Asian multinational corporations (MNCs) and a vigorous localization drive, the Iranian auto industry has in the past two decades increased its production severalfold. Whereas reliance on imported complete knockdowns (CKDs) has remained extensive in th...

This volume explores Iran’s industrial and trade policy options for achieving sustainable, export-oriented, and pro-employment growth. The first part of the book discusses Iran’s economic and industrial development performance, as well as strategies for enhancing capabilities, fostering productive transformation, and developing employment that can...

This book examines economic inequality and social disparity in Iran, together with their drivers, over the past four decades. During this period, income distribution and economic welfare were affected by the 1979 Revolution, the eight-year war with Iraq, post-war privatization and economic liberalization initiatives carried out under the Rafsanjani...

A major part of the discourse associated with Iran’s 1979 Revolution revolved around rising economic inequality and the goal of social justice in the name of the lower strata of the society (Parsa 1989: 82–85; Nowshirvani and Clawson 1994: 229; Behdad 1996: 99; Amuzegar 2014: 66). At the same time, the middle class had a leading role (Amirahmadi 19...

Iran has experienced a string of sociodemographic transitions during the last half a century. To start with, mortality rates have gradually declined since the 1960s (Khosravi et al. 2007). Furthermore, life expectancies for both sexes have steadily increased to register at 72 years in 2011 (UNDESA 2015). Yet, fertility rates in Iran have received a...

In a recent survey of 1767 leaders from academia, business, government, and nonprofits, the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council found increasing income inequality to be the top global concern in 2015, followed by increasing joblessness, and lack of leadership across countries (WEF 2015). Inequality indeed matters and there is a rich litera...

Municipality, NGOs, and Women’s Empowerment in Tehran: An Analysis of Activities, Approaches, and Links. In A.R. Saeidi, et al, eds. Zanan va eqtesad-e shahri [Women and the urban economy], Tehran Municipality, pp. 109-128 (in Persian). پویا علاءالدینی و ندا طوسی، «شهرداری، سازمانهای غیردولتی و توانمندسازی زنان درتهران: تحلیل فعالیتها، رویکردها و...

This report examines the institutional capacity and structure of the community-based cash transfer program (CB-CCT) as it is being scaled-up under the Productive Social Safety Net (PSSN) project; probes the delivery of social services in rural communities in relation to PSSN; assesses the institutional capacity of carrying out activities complement...

Introduction: Across much of the developing world, rapid urbanization has gone hand in hand with the proliferation of urban informal settlements which often provide shelter for the poorest urban communities. Earlier public sector approaches in dealing with these settlements, such as leaving residents to their own devices or resettling them, were un...

In this article, we probe the issue of information and communication technology development in Iran in recent years by focusing on the country’s information and communication technology firms. We first provide an overview of the structural and institutional context of information technology development in the country. We then turn to a discussion o...

In this paper, we suggest that the rise of IT/NE has a mixed effect within and across spaces, nations, and regions. Acting as technological wave, IT/NE is intensifying social, economic, and spatial polarization. The new technologies have created a new economic paradigm that is affecting virtually every aspect of production and consumption. Whereas...

This paper contributes to discussions on slum upgrading and housing and land markets in developing countries by presenting some empirical evidence from an ongoing World Bank/Government of Iran (UUHRP) social assessment and impact evaluation in three Iranian provincial capitals. Quantitative and qualitative information was collected through a compre...

[Excerpt] This report is descriptive in nature. When the ILO commissioned the researchers for the Country Study Series, each was asked to follow the comprehensive research protocol appended to this document. The resulting report therefore includes country background information, statistics about people with disabilities and their organizations, a d...