Estimating the Contribution of ICT Sector to GDP of Iran based on Curve Fitting, ARIMA and Artificial Neural Networks Methods

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has become a key driver of economic growth over the past decade. This industry also play a significant role in Iran's economy and has emphasized in 20-year's vision document and 5th national's development plan. The aim of this study is to estimate the contribution of ICT sector to GDP in Iran's 6th national development plan (2016-2020) using forecasting methods. So we have estimated Iran's GDP and ICT value added with polynomial curve fitting, ARIMA and neural networks models. The calculations showed that the contribution of ICT Sector to GDP will be 4.57, 6.2 and 3.7 percent with mentioned methods, respectively. The comparison of error characteristics showed that neural network method estimation had more performance relatively.