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Economic liberalization policy has been among the major concern of the governments during the last few decades. However, its impact on economic growth is still a controversial issue. The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of trade liberalization and financial development on economic growth in Iran using annual observations over the period 1973-2007. The current study would use ARDL technique to estimate the empirical model. The findings of this paper indicate that there is a long run positive and significant relationship between trade liberalization and financial development and economic growth in Iran over the period of the study. The error correction coefficient is around 0.32 showing that the adjustment towards the long run equilibrium takes place within almost three years. The Granger causality test indicates that causality runs from trade liberalization and financial development to GDP.

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The macroeconomic situation, government and central bank intervention in economy accompanied by business cycle consequences resulted from world economy, can stimulate profitability of borrowers and cause high default rates of payments for banking systems. In such an atmosphere, having an estimated model helps us to better understand the relations among macroeconomic variables, the behavior of bad loans and credit risk. In this paper, we study the influence of macroeconomic shocks on the bad loans from 2000 to 2007. At first, we apply an ARDL model, since the exogenous variables of this model have endogenous characteristics as well; we attempt to utilize a VAR model to explain the dynamic behavior of these variables. Impulse-response function is also used as a stress testing factor to investigate the impulse effects of bad loans to economic shocks. Based on estimated models, we study the effects of economic shocks such as loans interest rate, government expenditures, oil price and liquidity on non-performing loans.