This study has two purposes. The first is evaluating the effect of technology spillover on the Iran’s agricultural exports through VECM method. The second goal is to investigate and compare the performance of GA against the VECM approach and identifying the best approach to estimate the pattern of agricultural exports. The findings indicate that the technology spillover have a significant positive effect on Iran’s agricultural exports. The effect of other variables; terms of trade, relative price index, the value added of agriculture sector and real exchange rate are significantly positive and only the effect of the trade partner’s GDP is negative statistically. Also a comparison of the GA and VECM performance shows that GA method, in estimating the pattern of Agriculture exports, has a greater optimum performance than VECM and is identified as the preferred method for optimizing agricultural export function. So, according to the positive effects of technology spillover on the agricultural exports, it is worthy, by creating a safe space for investing, infrastructural facilities and Prioritization of high yield sections, to provide the possibility of attracting more FDI and using the donations of technology spillover more efficient. Also, according to high performance of GA in optimization, utilization of this method is recommended in scientific studies.

JEL Classification: Q1,Q16,Q17

Keywords:
Technology Spillovers, Genetic Algorithms, VECM, Iran’s Agricultural product exports