Budget in Research and Economic Growth in Iran: Markov Switching Approach

The importance of Research and Development (R&D) in economic growth and development has considered and theoretically and empirically confirmed by researchers. It can be said that the necessity of entering the global markets and developing the modern industrial sectors in any country is to focus on basic and applied research. This paper aims to investigate the impact of “the share of research budget in GDP” on economic growth in Iran during the 1969-2012 period. For this purpose, we estimate Iran’s economic growth model with emphasis on the role of the research budget share (% of GDP) by using the introduced model in Tunali (2016) and specifying a Markov Switching model. The estimation results indicate that the research budget share (% of GDP) has a significant and positive effect on economic growth in Iran. Moreover, the results show economic growth in Iran has two regimes, including a regime with high mean and variance (high-growth regime) and another regime with low mean and variance (low-growth regime). According to the results, the probability of staying in the low-growth regime is higher than staying in the high-growth regime. Finally, this paper suggests that to improve the economic growths, increasing in Iran’s budget in research is essential. In addition, funding applied research, which targeted to strengthen the national production, especially high-tech and knowledge-based products are useful for promoting the growth trend.