An Asymmetric Analysis of Income Inequality and Inflation on Economic Wellbeing in Iran

In this research, the index of economic well-being, concentrating on four aspects of consumption flow, wealth stocks, income distribution, and economic security has been calculated during the period of 1350-1400 in Iran. Then, the effect of income inequality and inflation on economic welfare is evaluated in two forms symmetric and asymmetric, through two approaches of linear and nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag. The results of symmetric estimation represent that in the long run, income inequality has an insignificant impact on economic welfare, While according to the asymmetric approach, only increases in income inequality have a negative impact on economic welfare, and decreases have an inconsiderable impact on it. Besides that, according to expectation, the inflation rate has a negative effect on economic welfare, in a way that the impact of increases in inflation on economic welfare is far more than the effects of decreases in inflation. In addition, it is also laid bare that, the variable of unemployment rate negatively and real GDP per capital positively affect economic welfare. The studies of this research, reveal that targeting declining income inequality singly is not capable of increasing the welfare in Iran. It is suggested to apply a sort of policy package for reducing the inflation rate which does not lead to intensification of income inequality.