Investigation of Economies of Scale and thier Evolutions in the Manufacturing Industries of Iran

The main purpose of this study is to investigate of economies of scale and thier evolutions in Iran’s manufacturing industries. Economies of scale are the cost advantages that companies achieve due to operational scale, and reducing the cost per unit of product increases the economies of scale. In this paper, economies of scale in the Iranian industries have been studied and analyzed with an approach based on econometric models and estimation of a translog cost function for the period from  2011 to 2019 in terms of two-digit ISIC codes. The results showed that the trend of scale elasticity in terms of the cost in Iran’s manufacturing industries had always been less than one for 19 years. Such a result confirms that Iranian industries have been almost within the range of economies of scale in the last two decades and have not yet left this range. Indeed, the Iranian manufacturing industries have not yet been able to grab the advantage of economies of scale and from this view, they still have small sizes and scales. Also, most of the country's large and capital-intensive industries have relatively large scales (compared to Iran’s economy) and their further development requires entry into export markets. in contrast, the labor-intensive industries in the country are mostly small-scale. This indicates that developing and expanding the size of firms through promoting the mentioned industries and resolving production problems and obstacles leads to greater prosperity and better utilization of economies of scale.