A Survey on Iran's Foreign Trade flow and Its Synchronization of Business Cycles with Southwest Asian Countries

One of the main issues in recent literature on regionalism is the relationship between the trade flow and synchronized business cycles of member countries. This paper attempt, to test and evaluate the significance of such relationship in Iran’s trade with southwest Asian countries in an organism from work based on date table method. To do so, the key indices of Iran’s trade intensity and its synchronization of business cycles with each surveyed country during 1980-2005 are used. The latter is obtained through measuring the GDP correlation coefficient among member countries. The results indicate that higher Iran’s trade flow with surveyed countries does not necessarily leads to its higher synchronization of business cycles.