Measuring the Production Gap during the UN Sanctions: Evidence from Manufacturing Plants in Iran

The 2012 UN sanctions on Iran have forced the country into a long-lasting economic recession during the last decade, causing both demand and supply to be suppressed in a general equilibrium relationship. However, as the sanctions targeted trade, oil revenue, and budget deficit, the economy’s supply-side constraints are of first-order magnitude, causing a reduction in oil income and a rise in the government budget deficit. This study uses observations from manufacturing plants in Iran from 2003 to 2013 to quantify the share of production factors in explaining production deviation. We employ a general equilibrium model in the literature of business cycle accounting, which quantifies wedges in different markets. The UN sanctions (Jan. 2012) occurred during observations, allowing us to assess changes after the sanctions using the event study model. Besides, we simulate counterfactual experiments with each market’s wedge to obtain a share of each wedge in explaining production changes. Results show that productivity is the main explanatory factor of the production gap during the sanctions. Results for the other factors of production (i.e., labor, investment, and inputs) indicate that the input market contains the highest frictions after the sanctions; we do not find evidence that the labor and capital markets are affected in the years following sanctions. However, the rest of the results are not robust except for the productivity, which may be due to the lack of a more extended panel of data after the sanctions. The findings are consistent with the rest of the literature on Iran’s sanctions.