Does Iran's Economy Benefit from a Reduction in Defense Budgets?

One of the fundamental questions in Defense Economics is whether the defense sector help to the process of economic growth and, or vice versa, leads to slowing economic growth. On the other hand, empirical evidence shows that the effect of increasing defense budgets on economic growth is not as diminished (asymmetric effect). In this regard, this paper tries to answer the question whether Iran's economy benefits from a reduction in defense budget? For this purpose asymmetric co-integration tests were used and data were collected from 1979-2016. The results of the model estimation using Nonlinear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (NARDL) show that in the short and long run, the positive and negative impacts of defense budget increase the economic growth, but the effect of negative impacts is greater than positive impacts (confirmation of asymmetric effects). On this basis, it can be said that reducing the defense budget and allocating more public expenditure to other non-defense sectors could lead to more accelerated economic growth. Of course, this result is taken only by considering the economic dimension of defensive expenditures and the decision on these expenditures should also be taken into account with regard to the political and security dimensions. According to other results, labor force growth rate, physical capital and oil export share of non-oil exports have a negative, positive and negative effect on economic growth, respectively.