The Effect of Agriculture Investment on Rural Poverty Alleviation in Iran

Investment as one of the important factors that has a positive impact on economic growth is expected to alleviate poverty in the long run. This paper studies the role of agricultural investment on economic growth and rural poverty in the rural areas of Iran. To estimate the model, we use the seemingly unrelated regression equations "SURE" and the time series date for the period 1971-2003 The results show that although agricultural investment has a positive effect on economic growth of this sector, the gains from the growth have not had a positive impact on poverty alleviation. It seems Iran agri-economic growth is not at the level that could affect the rural poverty and the benefit resulted from current growth rate does not trickle-down to the rural poor.