Evaluation of Asymmetric Effects of Oil Shocks on Economic Growth of Iran (1971-2008)

Iran’s economy is vulnerable to fluctuations in oil price. This study examines the impact of oil shocks on economic growth using Vector Auto-Regressive (VAR) method. The Mork’s (2010) method was used to test hypothesis of symmetry in negative and positive shocks. The results show that، the effects of negative and positive shocks on economic growth are asymmetric. In addition، the results of variance decomposition of economic growth indicate that the effects of positives shocks in explaining economic growth fluctuations are greater than negative ones. On the other hand، the results from impulse response functions show that positive and negative shocks have positive and negative effects on economic growth، respectively; however، the size of positive shocks impact on output growth is far more than that of negative shocks in the long-run. Moreover، the estimated VAR model shows that there is a high and positive correlation between oil revenues and gross domestic product (GDP)، which confirms again dependency of national economy to oil revenues.