The Improvement of Business Environment in the Fifth Development Plan

Previously thought that economic enterprises needs to create only economic-political stability for their activity but in the 1990s the importance of business environment as the relevance of micro and macro economics was proposed in economic literature. At first, the paper defines the business environment and then given the first step in reforming business environment is to identify its challenges and deficiencies, some tools and indicators are introduced to identify them and the position and status of Iran's business environment can be explained based on the indicators and tools. Then reviews the plans for reforming Iranian business environment before the fifth development plan and compares the reforming plans needed to improve the business environment (derived from the introduced indicators) with the business environment-related Articles of the fifth development plan Act to assess the overall business environment of the fifth development plan and some of the proposed Articles that should be considered in future plans and policies on reforming the business environment are recommended. Results of the paper show that Iran business environment is inappropriate based on internal and external indices and according to the identified challenges by them, reforming policies should be adopted. Including the paper emphasizes specially on the problem of monopoly in the Iranian economy according to the one of internal indices of business environment results. Also, the study of Articles on the improvement of business environment chapter of the fifth development plan Act showed that Articles provided in the bill werent complete and a priority but fortunately, representatives of the parliament added some Articles such as Exchange rate fluctuations insurance, Increased private sector participation, Labor law reform and deregulation to them that it was very effective in improving this chapter. It seems some reforms, including reducing dependency on oil revenues, accurate enumeration of non-governmental public sector, limiting the scope and extent of its activities, and reducing corruption have been higher priority reforms than the Articles listed in the fifth development plan Act on improving the business environment and hope to be considered in other plans and policies.