Financial Repression and Inflation-Unemployment Causality in Iran

In recent years, Iran's economy has experienced stagflation, low inflation rates or low unemployment rates at the cost of a considerable increase in the other. Government seeks to find ways to repress and manipulate markets to lower its debt financing costs. In this field, financial repression will provide very important policy implications for Iran's economy, which will make it possible for the country's macroeconomic policymakers to target inflation and unemployment rates. Based on this, this paper investigates the effect of financial repression on the causal relationship between inflation and unemployment using the bivariate and multivariate Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) between inflation and unemployment, taking into account the financial repression index (exchange rate and interest rate) in the period from 1987 to 2020. The findings show that despite the existence of a strong long-term two-way causal relationship between inflation and unemployment in the bivariate causality test, there is no significant causal relationship between inflation and unemployment in Iran in the presence of the indicators of financial repression. These findings indicate the absence of inflation-unemployment trade-off in Iran and support that this trade-off is not behavioral and is completely influenced by the government's interventions in the economy.