The Effect of External Economic Shocks on Iran's Macroeconomic Variables: Global VAR Approach

Macroeconomic policy analysis and risk management require taking account of the increasing interdependencies across markets and economies. National economic issues need to be considered from global as well as domestic perspectives. This invariably means that many different channels of transmission must be taken into account. This paper investigates the effect of global economic shocks on Iran’s economy.  The Global Vector Autoregressive (GVAR) model for the first quarter of 1990 to the fourth quarter of 2019 is used for 34 countries, which cover about 90% of world gross domestic products. According to previous studies and the results of this study, it is found that only the shocks of the United States, China and the global shock affect the macroeconomic variables of other countries and oil prices, and as a result, the effect of these three shocks on the Iranian economy is investigated. Ceteris paribus, the results show that China's shock affects the variables of GDP and Iran's inflation: with a 1 percent increase in China's GDP, Iran's GDP increases by 0.08 percent and inflation by 1.2 percent and has no effect on interest rates. The US shock has an indirect effect on oil prices. Due to the isolation of the economy, foreign variables do not have significant effects on the Iranian macroeconomic variables. In general, Iran's economy, due to the size of the economy and the volume of trade shocks of other trading partners through the foreign trade channel do not affect the Iranian economy.