A Survey on the Effect of Infrastructure on Economic Growth in Iran (1976-2012)

infrastructure development is one of the important requirements of economic growth and increasing welfare. Direct investment on infrastructure causes providing the manufacturing facilities, stimulate economic activities and improve competitiveness by decreasing the costs of trade and transfer and finally facilitate the economic growth of Iran. In this study, we had attempted to examine the effect of physical infrastructure as an important infrastructure on economic growth. For this purpose; we used the production function model and we have used three types of variables including physical, social and ICT infrastructures, to identify the effect of infrastructure on economic growth. weve introduced the physical infrastructure by using 4 variables which via factor analysis method becomes one indicator. Also, we have used the health expenditure and ICT capital stock as social and ICT infrastructures respectively. for estimating the model, we were used the auto regressive distributed lag(ARDL) method in the period 1976 to 2012. Results showed that in the period under review, the impact of physical, social and ICT infrastructures on economic growth has been positive and significant.