The Impact of the Economic Components of the Soft Power of the Islamic Republic of Iran on the Development of Trade Relations with China

One of the factors influencing the desire of countries to develop their trade relations is the level of soft power of the target country and the extent of its influence on international equations. The present article answers the question that among the economic components of the soft power of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which of them has been effective in the development of trade relations between Iran and China? The method used in this research is the autoregressive model with distributed interrupts (ARDL) and the data analyzed in this paper are related to the period 1988 to 2019. The results obtained from data analysis indicate that the economic components of Iran's soft power play a very important role on China's desire to develop trade relations with Iran.Increasing Iran's economic power in terms of GDP, improving social capital and increasing foreign investment has played a very important role in developing Iran-China trade relations. International and development of trade relations with other countries requires increasing the country's soft power, especially in components such as domestic production, social capital and foreign investment, and increasing Iran-China trade relations can be justified in the context of increasing the soft power of the Islamic Republic of Iran.