سید حسین میرجلیلی

During the last three decades, financial sanctions have been imposed on Iran by the United States, the European Union, and the United Nations Security Council. This paper aims at estimating the effect of financial sanctions on the import of capital and intermediate goods in Iran, which was carried out for two independent time periods. The first period (2010-2013) includes multilateral financial sanctions, and the second period (2016-2019) includes multilateral sanctions and the withdrawal of the United States from the JCPOA. We examined the impact using the difference-in-difference (DID) method. The results of the first period indicate that the decrease in the imports of capital and intermediate goods in Iran depends more on the countries that "provided the sanctions plan" than the countries that did not provide the sanctions plan, because the coefficient of dummy variable for implementation in the random effects model is statistically significant. The negative effect of 0.007 on imports shows that the effect is weak, because this group of countries behaved differently. In the second period, the random effects model is statistically significant. In this model, the negetive effect of 0.22 on imports indicates a significant effect. Therefore, the reduction of Iran's imports in this period depends more on the countries that provided the sanctions plan than the countries that did not provide the plan.

The positive impacts of fiscal policy could be undermined when accompanied by uncertainty. We examined the effect of fiscal policy uncertainty on economic activities in the provinces of Iran. It includes production, investment, unemployment, and economic participation of the active workforce in these provinces, taking into account the effects of economic sanctions imposed on the economy. We employed two types of shocks: fiscal level shock (representing fiscal policy) and its volatility shock (as fiscal policy uncertainty), which derived from a specified fiscal reaction function. We estimated a Panel VAR model using provincial data from 2003 to 2020. The results of the impulse response function indicated that following the impulse in the fiscal policy uncertainty, the response shows an increase in the unemployment rate in the short run, a decrease in the capital investment, and an increase in the inflation rate in the short and medium terms. In the medium and long term, the response indicates a decrease in GDP growth and a reduction in the economic participation rate of the active workforce.

In the decade of 1979-1988, there was no development plan in Iran. During 1989-2022, six development plans implemented in Iran’s economy. The assessment of development plans conducted based on the performance and the results of economic indicators over the period. Economic Growth over the course of development plans was volatile. There has been a double-digit inflation rate over the course of the development plans and Productivity and the distribution of income indices were volatile. The challenges of planning in Iran include lack of common understanding on basic concepts of development plans, challenges of comprehensive plan, essential change due to external shocks, time span, parallel initiatives, coordination failure and lack of independent evaluation entity.

In Iran, especially in the aftermath of economic sanctions of the 2010s, and the intensification of the government's budget deficit, since 2012, there was a diminishing investment, followed by a decrease in production which led to stagnation in the economy. The government plays its economic role by implementing fiscal policy. However, when it is associated with uncertainty, the effectiveness of fiscal policy may be undermined. Therefore, we need to measure the uncertainty of fiscal policy in Iran. We measured the uncertainty index of fiscal policy in Iran using a specified fiscal reaction function. In this function, there are two types of shocks. First, fiscal level shock and second, volatility shock which is a proxy for fiscal policy uncertainty. To this end, we employ particle-filter to estimate fiscal policy uncertainty in Iran. In this paper, by measuring the structural budget balance function for Iran, we utilize it as a dependent variable. The results indicate that the trend of balance or total budget deficit has a compliance with the trend of balance or structural budget deficit for Iran suggesting that the nature of government budget in Iran is a structural one, and in the 2010s the sanctions, adversely affected on the government budget. In 2012, the intensification of sanctions led to the increase in the uncertainty of fiscal policy until 2015 that the trend of fiscal policy uncertainty was mildly downward. In 2017, the uncertainty index of Iran's fiscal policy has increased rapidly until it reached its maximum in 2020, in which the economy did not face with such uncertainty for fiscal policy since 1979.