Impact of Trade Liberalization on the Iran’s Employment Level

Trade Liberalization as a feature of globalization provides international competitiveness and contribution of countries to the most economic activities. It is obvious that the lower degree of competion the less chance exists for some firms that wish to continue their activities. However, there is evidence in the literature that trade liberalizaion leads to job opportunities in various industires.The objective of this paper is to investigate a dynamic interacted relationship between trade liberalization and emploment for the Iranianian economy. This includes both short-run and long-run effects, arising from globalization which deals with a completed stage of liberalization. We use time series data over 1959-2003, to examine the long-run and short-run trade liberalization-emploment relationship by specifying an ARDL model and ECM, respectively. The estimation results obtained indicate that trade liberalization, through policies either eliminatining or reducing tariff, has a significant short-run effect on the Iran’s employment level. In addition, a proxy for globalization has statistically a significant sign in the long-run employment model, specified by the ARDL (1,0,01). This implies that employment creation in the Iranian economy is based upon an appropriate synchronization between a trade liberalization policy and globalization. The results also show that import liberalization in consumer and a part of intermediate goods has a positive and significant impact on employment, while capital import liberalization affects highly emploment in the long-run.