The effects of financial development on poverty in Iran

Poverty is one of the most important problems in developed and developing countries such as Iran. For solving this problem, many studies have investigated the effective factors on poverty. In this paper, the impact of financial development on absolutepoverty in Iran has been investigated during 1985-2013 by using the Structural Time Series method. For do it, two indicators of financial development including “financial deepening” and “the facilities granted by the banking system to the private sector divided by GDP” have been applied. Estimation results of the models indicate that the financial development has a non-linear and threshold impact on absolute poverty. In other word, when “the financial development indicators” are less than a threshold level, financial development causes deterioration of the poverty in society but after this threshold level and developing financial development in the country, expanding financial development has a significant negative impact on poverty. The threshold level of “financial deepening” and “the facilities granted by the banking system to the private sector divided by GDP” have been estimated about 0.62 and 0.27 respectively.