Asymmetric Effects of Oil Price Shocks on Iran's Major Economic Variables

Too much reliance on oil incomes in oil-exporter countries is considered by economists as an undesired phenomenon. The phenomenon is undesirable because of exogenous nature of the oil price for these countries and the severe effects of sudden changes in the world oil price on the economy of such countries. This paper is an attempt to study the effects of unpredicted and exogenous changes of oil prices known as oil shocks during 1990 and 2008 on four major variables of Iran’s economy including economic growth، inflation rate and growth rates of government’s current and capital expenditures. For this purpose، Structural Vector Autoregressive Model and seasonal data are used. The results regarding the main hypothesis of the research about asymmetry in the effects of positive and negative shocks reveal that the effect of negative shocks in form of decrease in economic growth is quite greater than that of positive shocks in form of increase in economic growth. Also، the inflation rate and government’s current expenditure growth rate show an asymmetric reaction to positive and negative shocks، in a way that the negative shocks of oil price has more effect on the said variables than the positive shocks. However، for the government’s capital expenditure growth rate، the results indicate that positive shocks are more effective on the reaction of this variable.