ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL GLOBALIZATION IN IRAN UNDER THE GOVERNMENT OF KHATAMI AND AHMADINEJAD: A COMPARATIVE APPROACH

This paper tries to analyze the growth of the index of economic and political globalization between the governments of Khatami and Ahmadinejad using secondary analysis of KOF Globalization Indexes. The findings of the paper firstly show that the growth of political and economic globalization in Khatami's government was 16.26 and 9.41 respectively, but under Ahmadinejad's government, this growth was 2.39 and less than one, namely, ./85 index, respectively. This means that the type of government in Iran has an impact on the degree of globalization. Secondly, our findings show that in both governments, an unbalanced globalization has been occurred in a similar way, in which the index of economic globalization under the governments of Khatami and Ahmadinejad were lagging behind of political globalization being respectively 28/15 and 39/6. Therefore, it shows that Iran's globalization depends on a more general category than the type of government. It was argued that this similar backwardness is less related to the type of government and is more influenced by similar inside consolidated structures. Therefore, it was suggested that in analyzing globalization studies in Iran, the analysis unit should be considered "inside" the country rather than the type of government. However, this analytical unit incorporates both the influence of the government and the consolidated historical structures outside the government. At the end, all these findings suggest that Iran's globalization is not an entirely external issue, but rather a flow that is largely connected to the "inside" of the country.