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The goal of this paper is investigating the relationship between unemployment rate and government size in Iran. For that, we have used some VAR models, which include the following variables: government size which is measured by total government outlays as a percentage of GDP, unemployment rate, real GDP growth rate, inflation rate, and minimum wage. The results reveal that a large government sector would raise unemployment, and an increase in GDP growth rate, inflation rate and minimum wages are likely to decrease unemployment rate.

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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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One of the most controversial and relatively old subjects in economics is the optimal size of government and its impact on macroeconomic variables. Government size and extent of public enterprises are of crucial impacts on economy. Thus, one of the main objectives of the governments is to achieve full employment. This paper investigates the effects of government size on unemployment rate in Iran’s economy using annual data during 1959-2011. It applies Pesaran, Shin and Smith (PSS) bounds testing approach to estimate an Unrestricted Error Correction Model (UECM), which derives both dynamic and long-term relationships. The finding of the research shows that the government size has a significant positive effect on unemployment rate, indicating that reducing the size of government would lead to reduction of unemployment rate in Iran. With increases in size of government, the crowding out effect in the form of private investment is decreased. As a result, productivity growth and international competition are reduced, then the unemployment rate is increased. The estimation of the ECM model shows that the error term is negative and statistically significant. The Error Correction Term (ECT) is relatively low (-0.27) indicating a slow adjustment toward the equilibrium.

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The main aim in this paper is to test the nonlinearity relationship between inflation and the government size in Iran during 1974-2012. To this end, we use a threshold regression approach and the Hansen nonlinearity test.  The result indicates nonlinear relationship between inflation and government size.  According to the results, an increase in government size by 0.22 will increase the rate of inflation with decreasing gradient, but afterwards any increase in government size will increase the rate of inflation.  In other words, under a small government regime, government size has negative effect on inflation, but in a large government regime, it has positive effect on inflation.

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With the expansion of government intervention in the economy, the investigation of relationship between government size and macroeconomic variables attracts more attention of economists, policymakers, and researchers. In the present study, the size of government and its correlation with trade openness are examined across developing Muslim countries (D-8) and OECD using panel data model during 2000-2012. The trade intensity index is used as one of the subcategories of trade openness. According to the results of unit root tests, which imply non-stationery series, co-integration test is run in order to assure a long-term relationship among variables. The regression model is estimated in fixed effects format using weighted least squares (WLS). The results indicate a significant and positive impact of the government size on the openness ratio by 12% for D-8 countries, however the relationship is not significant for OECD at the 5% level of significance. The relationship between government size and country size (total population) is positive for two groups. The findings imply that making different policies to remove trade barriers may result in strengthening good governance indicators.

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According to the Kau and Robin (K&R) hypothesis, an increase in the government's power to collect taxes increases the size of government. In this regard, the main objective of this paper is to test this hypothesis for the Iranian economy during the period of 1971-2014. For this purpose, two variables are used as indicators of government's power to collect taxes: rate of female participation in the labor market and self-employment rate. The estimation method is a canonical co-integration regression (CCR). The results indicate no significant impact of the mentioned indicators on the government size. Thus, Kau-Rubin hypothesis is rejected for the Iranian economy. The FMOLS and DOLS estimators reconfirm the results.

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For more than a century, the causal relationship between government size and economic growth has been a challenging issue in the public sector economics. However, there is no theoretical or empirical consensus among economists on this issue. Accordingly, it seems that the best way to resolve these theoretical and empirical contradictions is experimentally investigation the causal relationship between government size and economic growth in each country. Therefore, this paper investigates the causal relationship between government size and economic growth using the Markov-Switching Granger Causality Approach in Iran over the period 1967-2017. The findings confirmed the existence of a non-linear causal relationship between government size and economic growth and showed that government size had a significant negative effect on economic growth in the form of a two-regime structure (regime Zero: 1966-2002 and regime one:1983-1987), although this negative effect was greater in regime one than in regime zero. This larger negative effect can be rooted in the fact that the share of current expenditure in total government expenditure was significantly larger in the years related to regime one (compared to regime zero). Finally, contrary to Wagner's law, Findings did not confirm the positive and significant effect of economic growth on government size in Iranian economy.

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This paper investigates the short- run and long-run effects of government size and exports on the economic growth of Iran as a developing oil export based economy for the period of 1974 - 2008 using an autoregressive distributed lags (ARDL) framework. A modified form of Feder (1982) and subsequently Ram’s (1986) model has been applied to include both government size and exports in growth equation. The findings show that in long run and short run the Armey curve (1995) is valid, indicating that both a very big size and a too small size of government are harmful for growth and government should adjust its size. The results also show that total exports, the amount of oil exports in terms of barrels and oil prices affect economic growth positively and significantly both in short-run and long-run. However, non-oil exports do not have a significant effect on growth in the long run