JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT (THE ECONOMIC RESEARCH)
Year:2018 | Volume:18 | Issue:1|Papers Count:8

The main objective of this research is to investigate the impact of financial structure on the Iranian economic growth volatility by applying GARCH & ARDL methods using quarterly data over the 1991-2015 period. The results indicate that financial development and financial structure have negative and positive effects on the economic growth volatility in Iran, respectively. The results reveal that financial structure in Iran is facing with several challenges, so that regardless of negative impact of financial development on economic growth volatility, the financial structure leads to economic growth volatility. In addition, oil revenues, government final consumption expenditure and capital formation have significant and negative relationships with economic growth volatility in the period under study.

The possible costs and benefits of trade liberalization generate essential problems for the developing countries and make free trade dubious. A major problem for developing countries is to create jobs in sectors supported indirectly by imposing import tariffs. This study aims to investigate the potential effects of the tariffs’ elimination of agricultural imports on the job creation of this sector and other sectors using 2011 input-output table. For the whole economy, the results show that private sector experiences 5. 5% and 9. 81% reductions in direct and indirect employment, respectively. On the other hand, public sector faces with 2. 63% and 4. 59% reductions in direct and indirect employment, respectively. According to findings, the reduction in direct employment is bigger than that of indirect employment.

Sustainable development is an essential goal for developing countries, which can be measured by various indices. This paper computes genuine saving for the Iranian economy based on national accounting and examines the relationship between genuine saving and present value of discounted consumption during 1960-2012. The results indicate that genuine saving is mostly negative over the period under study and there is also a negative relationship between genuine saving (as a measure for the nation wealth) and the change in the present value of consumption (as a national welfare index). According to Hartwick’ s rule, these findings mean that welfare reduction is a possible outcome in the future.

Natural resources generate the major part of national wealth in resource-rich developing countries. Based on economic theories, if natural resource rents are reinvested continuously in other forms of capital, such countries can benefit from these resources. Thus, examining the mechanism of how to rents affect economic growth through capital accumulation channels is of great importance. Because of the importance of management of resource rents in achieving sustainable growth and development in resource-rich countries, this paper investigates the impacts of resource rents on accumulation of four kinds of capital (foreign, physical, human and social capital) in Iran during 1970-2014. To this end, a simultaneous equations system consisting of various capital forms is designed, and estimated by using Seemingly Unrelated Regression estimator. According to the findings, resource rents have positive effects on accumulation of foreign, human and social capital in Iran. But it is of negative effect on accumulation of physical capital. The results show that physical capital is affected by natural resource rents more than other kinds of capital. This is because of unproductive government investments in physical capital, hence not only resource rents increase physical capital but also they affect physical capital negatively.

In this study, the allocation of resources of National Development Fund (NDF) to economic sectors in foreign currency and Rial is evaluated by making a structural macro-econometric model that expresses the reality of Iran’s economy as much as possible. This model consists of 45 behavioral equations, 28 connecting equations and 88 identities. Behavioral equations are estimated by the ARDL approach in Eviews 9 software using annual data from 1959 to 2014. According to Theil’s U statistic and root mean square error (RMSPE), the simulation of endogenous variables indicates that model gives a good explanation of Iran’s economy mechanism. Regarding different scenarios for how to allocate resources of National Development Fund to different economic sectors, simulation results over the 2011-2014 period show that if 80% of NDF’s resources is distributed in proportion to the share of sector's investment in total investment in foreign currency and remaining 20% is allocated equally to agriculture and industry sectors in Rial, the highest rate of economic growth will be realized.

Inequality is a major problem in the developing countries. It is also an acute and critical subject in Iran compared with other developing economies. Besides the existence of inequality, its social effects have made its explanation crucial. The aim of this research is to measure the multidimensional inequality in urban areas of Iran during three presidential periods: 1989-1997, 1997-2005 and 2005-2013. Income, health and education are the dimensions under study. This research uses household expenditure-income survey data for the selected periods. Gini coefficient is measured for one-dimensional inequalities in terms of each dimension, generalized entropy is computed for the beginning and ending years of each period, and the multidimensional inequality is measured by using the Bourguignon index. Results indicate that the Gini coefficient decreased in terms of income dimension in all three periods while it increased in terms of health dimension during all periods. In education dimension, Gini index increased in the second period and decreased in other periods. The measured entropy indices are of some fluctuations in all periods for all dimensions. The measured multidimensional inequality index provides a wide range of results for different substitution and inequality aversion parameters. In general, this index indicates worse conditions in the second period compared with other periods.

The consumption pattern of typical household is a combination of quantities, qualities, acts and tendencies describing use of resources for survival, comfort and enjoyment by society or a group of people. In this paper, we examine the impact of cash subsidies on expenditure pattern of households after implementing Subsidy Targeting Project at both urban and rural levels in Iran. We estimate a panel data model by applying data on household income and expenditure survey (HIES) during 2004-2014. Findings indicates that paying cash subsidies significantly affects all 14 expenditure categories in urban and rural households, except for health expenditure in rural households. Consequently, the shares of eight urban expenditure categories and nine rural expenditure ones have increased, while the shares of six urban expenditure categories and four rural expenditure ones have decreased. In all cases except for home durable goods, the shares of urban and rural expenditure categories, the shares of other household expenses and transfers changed in a same direction. In both urban and rural levels, all increased shares of expenditure are related to current household’ welfare, but the shares of categories which increases future household’ welfare have decreased. It seems changes in relative prices after paying cash subsidies have persuaded households to sacrifice some investment, education, and health expenditure for additional expenditure required for meeting basic needs.

Poverty decomposition provides useful information about the factors affecting poverty and helps the politicians to choose suitable poverty reduction policies. In this context, sectoral decomposition (Ravallion-Huppi, 1991) and growth– equality decomposition (Datte-Ravallion, 1992) are the most widely used methods for poverty decomposition. But the ambiguous elements (such as residual and interaction terms) existing in these methods resulted in developing a new decomposition method by Fujii (2014). His decomposition method is residual-free and has some desirable properties including time-reversion consistency, and sub-period additivity. In the present study, following Fujii (2014) and using Iran’s rural and urban household expenditure and income data, the poverty is decomposed into six components: population shift (PS), within-region redistribution (WR), between-region redistribution (BR), nominal growth (NG), inflation (IF), and methodological change (MC). The results show that population shift (PS), within-region redistribution (WR) and inflation components explain the highest portion of the poverty changes in the urban and rural areas. Based on the results, the pro-poor growth policies and immigration-reducing policies are recommended for reducing rural poverty, while the growth-oriented policies with redistribution are recommended for decreasing urban areas. In all periods, inflation is the main poverty-increasing factor in both urban and rural areas; therefore, controlling inflation can reduce poverty rates.