جستجوی مقالات مرتبط با کلیدواژه "political cycles" در نشریات گروه "اقتصاد"

Pension indexation against inflation is crucial, especially in Iran with high and persistent inflation. Pensions worldwide are mainly adjusted automatically based on a definite indexation rule, but in Iran, it is provided by a considerable discretionary power of government. Hence, the study of economic and political determinants of pension indexation in Iran is critical and interesting.

This study using Iran’s Social Security Organization (ISSO)’s data of pensions paid from 1340 (1960) to 1396 (2018) computes annually the actual pension indexation rate and explains it in a OLS model.

The incomes of ISSO, other expenses like the cost of hospital and medical services, population dependency ratio, the minimum wage, economic (GDP) and political cycles (presidential and parliament elections) have great influences on the discretionary rate of pension indexation in Iran. Old-age pensions in Iran are partly indexed against inflation with a ratio of 0.6, although in the years before presidential elections, pensions are indexed with a ratio of 1.23 above the inflation.

Pensions in Iran become eventually inadequate and retirees’ life are affected by political cycles as a result of indexation without a defined rule. The results show that ISSO’s pensions are provided effectively in a Pay-as-you-go system where dependency ratio and the contribution base are the most influential factors. Pensions were positively related with minimum wage and negatively with the country’s GDP showing that these welfare expenditures are countercyclical and act as an automatic stabilizer.

Construction projects are the basic requirements of sustainable development and growth. Inefficient procedures of implementing the construction projects, regardless of our financial and administrative capacities, has imposed a large amount of unfinished and occasionally stopped projects to national economy. Since there are various components that affect the fate of projects, therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to answer this question that whether the political cycles affect the adoption and implementation of provincial construction projects or not? In order to answer this question, two hypotheses are considered in this paper. Therefore, GMM dynamic method was used to estimate the model and test hypothesis in the years 1997-2014. Hypothesis one: political cycles affect the fate of construction projects, and the second hypothesis: the impact of political cycles on the adoption and implementation of construction projects are larger in the year prior to political cycle (election). Therefore, in order to estimate the model and test the research hypothesis, provincial data during the years was used. Results of testing two hypotheses suggest that parliamentary and presidential political cycles have a significant positive correlation with the construction projects. Results also show that the presidential political cycle has a larger impact on construction projects, meaning that the impact of political cycles on the process of adopting and implementing the construction projects in the year prior to the political cycle is larger. In this regard, in order to eliminate the impacts of the governmental and parliamentary political cycle on construction projects, it is recommended to determine a competent authority that has the necessary qualifications as well as the sufficient degree of independence and supervision power over the project's Feasibility studies. The referenced mentioned will be approve projects based on objective justification-technical and district-based studies and it prevents the adoption of development plans based on the political considerations of the government and parliamentarians.

Political business cycle theory investigates the interaction between voters and the government. According to this theory, economic factors have significant influence on voters’ behavior. Hence, governments try to adopt different economic policies to meet voters’ satisfaction. This paper attempts to estimate an ARMA model for political business cycles in Iran during the period of 1978-2016. The results indicate that inflation fluctuates during the elections. Inflation drops in the election year and rises in the post-election periods. In addition, the budget deficit increases and capital investment decreases over the pre-election periods. The ARMA model was insignificant for post-election periods. The results of the monetary variables (liquidity and net government debt to the central bank) show that the behavior of these variables confirms the existence of a political business cycle. In election years and the pre-election year relative to other years, net government debt to the central bank increases by 3% on average. This results in higher liquidity in the next period. Finally the unemployment rate is not influenced by the political business cycle.

During the last few decades, the study of the effect of non-economic variables in the economy has become a prominent subject matter for the researchers. One of the most important issue in these cases are the effects of elections (as a political phenomenon) on the economic variables, which in the economic literature is referred to as the political cycle. Thus, in this study, by using panel data for 29 selected countries (in two groups including the developed and developing countries) during the period 1994-2011, we attempt to evaluate the effects of political cycles (indicators include: the year of the election, the minority government, coalitions, government ideology) on the unemployment growth rate. To investigate this, generalized least square (GLS) and generalized method of moments (GMM) techniques have been used. Based on the results, candidates of each country irrespective of their ideology (left wing or right wing) try to gain a greater number of people's vote by increasing
job opportunities, reducing unemployment and promoting the business environment. Furthermore, the variables of the minority government and coalitions have significant influence (respectively positive and negative effect) on the growth of unemployment rate in developing countrie (unlike the cases of the developed countries).