Evaluating the Effects of Doing Business on Economic Growth by GMM Method: Case Study Copmaring Irand with MENA and OECD Countries

Regulatory barriers to doing economic activities lead to reducing entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial activities, investment, job creation, and ultimately economic growth will decrease. Thus, deregulation and structural adjustment in the laws and regulations in terms of improving the business environment is one of the main priorities to achieve economic growth and development.
According to above, main purpose of this paper is investigating the effect of doing business (DB) indicators on economic growth by using panel data method and GMM estimator, for Iran, OECD and MENA countries during 2006-2012.
The main findings of our investigation are: First, Iran economic growth has decreased in recent years. Second, studying and comparing Iran DB indicators with MENA and OECD countries show that they are low and Iran's ranking is undesirable. Third, the results show a robust support for the claim that the improvement in DB indicators will lead to an increase in the economic growth.
About MENA countries, dissolution index (RI=0.18) has the greast effect on ecomicgrowth and least effect is related to cross-border index(0.027). However, for OECD countries the greatest and least effects are belong to starting business index (SB=0.35) and tax payment (PT=0.12). while the PT index has negative effect (-0.23) on MENA countries economic growth. Because worsening business environment leads to decreasing economic growth.