Oil Revenues

Oil is undoubtedly the most important, and at the same time, the most politico-economic commodity in today’s world. As the most important source of economic and political power, oil has constantly played a significant role for Iranian governments both before and after the revolution [1979], and has served as a major fuel for their economic power. However, historical experience in our country shows that having exuberant oil resources and revenue has had no significant link to welfare facilities or to becoming a welfare state; and the governments have always deprived the country from having a democratic state by creating certain rent-seeking networks. This article studies the effects of oil revenue in the formation of a democratic state accountable to its subjects while tries to show how huge amount of oil revenue during 2005 to 2013 halted the process of democratization in the country.

The present paper is meant to answer the question: How fluctuation in economic growth rate increased the risk of instability in Iran in the Post-JCPOA? In response and based on reliable data and taking a political economy approach, it is hypothesized that the high fluctuations in the economic growth rate associated with JCPOA has led to the political instability through deepening and intensification of expectations gap. To do so and using a comparative method, a number of factors associated with calculating modes of added value (sub-sectors including agriculture, oil, industry and mining, and ) as well as international indicators affecting the economic growth are analyzed in the two time spans of pre and post JCPOA. For further validity, reference is made to the results of some polls conducted by some credible institutes. The findings show that the sudden rise and fall of the economic growth rate due to oil revenues after the agreement turned the hope created in the context of the expected gap formed by the promises of the agreement into disappointment; and paved the way for street unrests

The present study investigates the impact of macroeconomic and bank-specific variables on non-performing loans (NPLs). To avoid the identification problem, two models are employed to address this impact. The first one tests the effect of macroeconomic variables including the growth of oil revenues, inflation, and the growth of GDP without the oil sector on the growth of NPLs. Data is quarterly over the period 2004:3 to 2019:3. The transition variable in this setup is the growth of oil revenues and its threshold is 9 percent, which divides the sample into oil booms and oil recessions. According to the results, inflation has a significant positive effect on NPLs. During the oil boom, oil revenues decrease the NPLs. Due to the immense size of the government and its current and capital expenditures, when oil revenues are lower, the government forces banks to allocate loans to finance projects with long maturity. Furthermore, the present study used PSTR to test the impact of bank-specific variables consisting of interest rate spread, loan loss provision, loan to deposit ratio, and NPLs. To do so, monthly data of 10 banks is used over 2016:04 to 2020:12. The transition variable is the interest rate spread at 1 percent, which categorizes the banks into two groups of good and bad. Good banks collect deposits with a low-interest rate and allocate high-rate loans with less chance of default. So, interest spread is the most important prominent determinant of decreasing NPLs, while the loan to deposit ratio is dependent on the banks belonging to which group. For good banks, the loan to deposit ratio decreases the NPLs, while for bad banks, it worsens the growth of NPLs.