The Impact of Military and Non-Military Expenditures on Iran's Economic Growth

Iran’s location in a strategic and turbulent region in one hand and its high share of military expenditures in the government budget on the other hand make it necessary to study the impact of military expenditures on the Iranian economic growth. This paper uses an augmented Solow model during 1959 and 2013 as well as the Granger causality test through vector autoregressive model (VAR) and Toda and Yamato as its methodology to study the causality relation between the variables which impact economic growth in Iran. The findings demonstrate that the military expenditures has a negative and significant impact on the Iranian economic growth. Also, there is a one-way causality relation between the military and non-military expenditures and oil revenues in a manner that petrodollars are spent for military and non-military expenditures. Therefore, it could be concluded that with an increase in oil revenues, the military and non-military expenditures of Iran rise as well. Also, the causality relation between oil revenues and economic growth in Iran is two-ways.