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This paper addresses two questions. Does inflation in Iran stem from fiscal policy? Does inflationary impact depend upon the sources of budget deficit financing? Although the above questions have already been studied, there is no consensus on the findings, since the results are sensitive to the methodologies and the time period covered by the data. This paper employs vector autoregressions, impulse response functions, variance decomposition and cointegration techniques to estimate the short and long term relationship between inflation and a number of fiscal indicators in Iran. The annual data are used over the period 1973 to 2006. Particular emphasis is placed on the government budget deficit predominantly financed by government borrowing. The results indicate that inflation is mostly induced by import prices, oil revenue and government budget deficit.

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The natural disasters decrease the savings through reducing the government savings rate. However, the resultant disasters effect on total savings depends on the private savings changes. In this paper, the impact of natural disasters on total savings is estimated using the data over the period 1973-2006. An Auto-Regressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) technique is used to estimate the empirical model. The results confirm that natural disasters raise the average propensity to savings in Iran. Moreover, the coefficient of error correction term indicates that 69 percent of the disequilibrium is corrected immediately, i.e. in the next year.

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International trade expansion and export development have been the center of attention by the economists, policy makers and the cornerstone of planning in many countries of the world. Agricultural and industrial sectors are the crucial economic sectors in every country that have a parity role in preparing food for people and industrial inputs. This article using vector error correction models considers the simultaneous effect of economic policies on agricultural and industrial exports during the years 1971 to 2005. After testing the stationery, Johansen test was used for long run estimation. Results have shown that monetary policy has positive and significant effect on industrial and agricultural exports in short run, while interest rate and government expenditures have significant inverse and direct effect on industrial and agricultural exports respectively, and exchange rate policy has the same effect on industrial and agricultural export in long-run. Finally, the strength of each variable was investigated on export. It is recommended that increasing non oil export, the real value of interest rate is determined and by rising volume of money and then investing it and improving commodity supply, inflation will decrease and therefore non oil export will increase.

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Due to the poor development of the domestic financial markets in Iran, a lack of efficient tax system and some restrictions on foreign borrowing in recent decades, the government budget deficit was mainly financed through borrowing from either the central bank or through the selling of the oil revenue dollars to the central bank, both of which led to increased monetary base. It caused to increase the rate of inflation as well. While printing money creates revenue through seigniorage for the government, it decreases the purchasing power of the money and people prefer to hold less cash money because of the inflationary effects of monetization of budget deficit and finally it will reduce the seigniorage revenue of the government. The aim of this article is to analysis seigniorage revenue in Iran using money demand function approach. The Johansen-Juselius Cointegration technique is used to estimate the empirical model using annual data over the period 1961-2007. The results of estimates show that semi elasticity of inflation rate is negative of 5/59 and the elasticity of GDP per capita is positive of 2/36 in long run. After first oil boom, seigniorage-maximizing rate of inflation, except during the period of war, is lower than the actual rate of inflation. According to the result, the economy is generally on the wrong side of the Laffer curve. The result does not depend on whether the expectations of agents form adaptively or rationally.

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The purpose of this paper is estimating output gap as one of the variables that affect inflation in the Iranian economy. Therefore, using seasonal data from spring 1989 to winter 2006 and through Hodrick-Prescott filtering techniques the potential output and output gap are estimated and then ordinary least squares approach has been used to find out the relationship between inflation and output gap. Variables such as exchange rates, price index of imported goods, and the adjusted output gap as real variables and expected future inflation have been used for estimating the model considering the facts and theories in the Iranian economy. This test has been done through the rational expectation hypothesis of an enterprise and using a new Keynesian Phillips curve. The research findings verify the new Keynesian opinion. Thus, in Iran where the average rate of inflation in the period, is 19.6% and therefore considered among the countries with galloping rate of inflation, Phillips curve has been estimated with a relatively steep slope. In the long run, the steep Phillips curve according to Keynesians implies that in case of demand shock, the production will increase and compared with the new classic models it has less impact on inflation.

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     The Armey curve demonstrates a non linear relationship between government size and economic growth. This study used threshold regression approach in order to test the Armey curve relationship between government size and economic growth in Iran. Two sector production function proposed by Rati Ram (1986) and three indices of government size are used in this paper. The results reveal that a non linear relationship between all indices of government size and economic growth does not exist in Iran.

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This paper examines the existence of β-Convergence between per-capita incomes of selected Islamic countries. For this purpose, data over the period 1965-2006 and a time series approach proposed by Vogelsang (1998) are applied. Robustness of the estimated parameters to the presence of unit roots and/or serial correlations in the residuals is the main advantage of this method. The results show that per-capita income of most countries is converging to the average per-capita income of the selected Islamic countries, which provide evidence of β-Convergence. Cameroon, Indonesia, Malaysia, Niger, Chad, and Togo are the countries that have shown some forms of divergence either before the break date or after that. The estimated break dates are clustered and mostly related to the energy shocks in 1974, 1979, and 1986.