Security of Natural Gas Supply: Assessment of Asian and European Markets Based on GSSI Index

There are many studies measured financial liberalization indices, but none of them studied the Iranian case. Therefore, to fill this gap, in this paper we introduce a comprehensive indicator for financial liberalization which considers various aspects of financial sector reforms. Then, we estimate the index and compare the results with Turkey, Pakistan, Malaysia and India. For the estimation of aggregate financial liberalization index, we used different methods of aggregation such as principal component method (PCM) and simple summation. Our findings show that Iran, Pakistan and India have started financial reforms since the mid 1990s, while Turkey and Malaysia have started a decade earlier, in 1980s. Moreover, the results show that the level of financial reforms in Iran is not very high amongst the countries considered while the index related to Turkey and Malaysia are higher than that of other selected countries.