The Investigation of Challenges of Iranian Petrochemical Industry within the Framework of General Policies on Resilient Economy

Complementing the value chain of the petrochemical industry is one of the most effective ways to implement general policies of the resilient economy as well as to deal with the vulnerability of oil and gas export earnings especially, in the face of devastating US sanctions. This paper examines challenges of the Iranian petrochemical industry in accordance with general policies of economic resilience. One of the effective ways to deal with these challenges is to make a proper plan for the establishment of a regulatory body for petrochemical industry sector through considering its indigenous components. The establishment of such an institution, in favorable conditions, can improve the performance of our country’s petrochemical sector. The research has been conducted based on documentary research method as well as comparative studies also using experienced experts’ point of views on petrochemical industry through preparing Delphi method questionnaire in order to determine the desirable criteria for petrochemical industry regulation also ranking these criteria. But given the available constrains, it may be impossible to address all the challenges. So their prioritization can help policy makers to deal with more important challenges at first. Hence, the Competition Council is considered as the regulatory authority who requires to intervene in the relevant petrochemical market through the establishment of a regulatory body. According to the results, the respective structures of our country should be reformed in order to perform their assigned tasks better. Also, “sector” and “multisector” concepts as two major points should be addressed that successfulness of regulatory authority is largely in the “Sector” regulatory body rather than multisector regulator due to their structural features. Therefore it seems to make better that theestablishment of a regulatory body for petrochemical sector which has a multisector nature only attributes to petrochemical products markets.