Investment in Economic Infrastructures and Economic Growth: The Case of Iran

One of the economic goals in many countries is providing favorable conditions to boost economic growth. One of the favorable conditions for increasing the production and economic growth is investment in economic infrastructures. In general, investment in economic infrastructures, boost production and economic growth through increasing the factors such as: productivity, development of market area, equilibrium between supply and demand, creating positive externality effects, making better environment for competition and increasing the welfare level. The objectives of this study are investigating the effect of investment per worker in economic infrastructures on the non-oil gross domestic production per worker and investigating the interaction of capital per worker, non-oil economic growth per worker and investment per worker in economic infrastructures. Vector autoregressive model has been used for empirical investigation during the period of 1961-2006. The empirical results of this study show that in long run the effect of investment per worker in the economic infrastructures on the non-oil gross domestic production per worker is positive and investment per worker in the communication infrastructures has the highest effect and investment per worker in energy infrastructure has the lowest effect on the non-oil domestic production per worker. Empirical results also show that in short run the relationship between non-oil economic growth per worker and investment growth per worker in the economic infrastructures is insignificant, but the effect of capital growth per worker on the non-oil economic growth per worker and investment per worker in the infrastructures is significant and positive.