The Effect of Non-Renewable Energy, on Institutional Quality and Production in the Iranian Economy: An Application of the State-Space Model

The main goal of this paper is to study the effect of non-renewable energy on output and institutional quality in Iran as an energy-rich country for the period 1984-2013. To this end, we introduce institutional quality into an endogenous growth model. The model allows us to examine how the resource abundance can influence output both directly and indirectly.In our model, the quality of institution is assumed to affect output through its impact on research and development (R&D) activities and the allocation of labor force between productive and non-productive sectors. The estimation results of our state-space model indicate that one percent improvement in institutional quality increases output and R&D expenditure by 0.22 and 0.23 percent, respectively. Moreover, we find that one percent increase in non-renewable energy raises output directly by 0.49 percent. However, we show that the use of non-renewable energy has a downward pressure on the quality of institutions in Iran and hence have negative impact on output indirectly.More specifically, one percent increase in using non-renewable energy decreases the index of institutional quality by 0.59 percent in Iran. This negative impact offsets the positive effect of using more non-renewable energy on GDP and hence lowers the growth rate. This finding highlights the importance of the institutional quality for enhancing the effect of non-renewable energy on output growth in Iran..