Economic Determinants of Domestic Investment in an Oil-Based Economy The Case of Iran (1965-2010) Khonsary-Atighi, Hadis Document Version Final published version Publication date: 2016 License CC BY-NC-ND Citation for published version (APA): Khonsary-Atighi, H. (2016). Economic Determinants of Domestic Investment in an Oil-Based Economy: The Case of Iran (1965-2010). Copenhagen Business School [Phd]. PhD series No. 14.2016 Link to publication in CBS Research Portal General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us ([email protected]) providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 24. Sep. 2021 COPENHAGEN BUSINESS SCHOOL ECONOMY: THE CASE OF IRAN (1965-2010) ECONOMIC DETERMINANTS OF DOMESTIC INVESTMENT IN AN OIL-BASED SOLBJERG PLADS 3 DK-2000 FREDERIKSBERG DANMARK WWW.CBS.DK ISSN 0906-6934 Print ISBN: 978-87-93339-92-7 Online ISBN: 978-87-93339-93-4 Hadis Khonsary-Atighi ECONOMIC DETERMINANTS OF DOMESTIC INVESTMENT IN AN OIL-BASED ECONOMY: THE CASE OF IRAN (1965-2010) The PhD School of Economics and Management PhD Series 14.2016 PhD Series 14-2016 ECONOMIC DETERMINANTS OF DOMESTIC INVESTMENT IN AN OIL-BASED ECONOMY: THE CASE OF IRAN (1965-2010) BY HADIS KHONSARY-ATIGHI JANUARY 2016 SUPERVISORS PROFESSOR ARI KOKKO; PROFESSOR KERRY PATTERSON IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS AND MANAGEMENT COPENHAGEN BUSINESS SCHOOL Hadis Khonsary-Atighi ECONOMIC DETERMINANTS OF DOMESTIC INVESTMENT IN AN OIL-BASED ECONOMY: THE CASE OF IRAN (1965-2010) 1st edition 2016 PhD Series 14.2016 © Hadis Khonsary-Atighi ISSN 0906-6934 Print ISBN: 978-87-93339-92-7 Online ISBN: 978-87-93339-93-4 “The Doctoral School of Economics and Management is an active national and international research environment at CBS for research degree students who deal with economics and management at business, industry and country level in a theoretical and empirical manner”. All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my sincere gratitude towards several persons who contributed to the completion of this PhD thesis. My special thanks go to my supervisors Professor Kerry Patterson and Professor Ari Kokko for their invaluable guidance when they were commenting on numerous versions of this PhD thesis. On a personal note, I would like to thank Professor Kerry Patterson for his trust in my abilities, for his great patience and for all his boundless help, support and inspiration from the beginning of the process of writing this thesis. Also, I am very grateful to Professor Ari Kokko who became my supervisor at a crucial time towards the end and continuously assisted me with the completion of this study. I would like to profoundly thank my PhD Assessment Committee for the time and expertise they have invested in giving me their insightful suggestions and corrections that immensely helped improve this thesis and for their generous support. I am greatly indebted to Professor Katarina Juselius for her invaluable help regarding the use of the CVAR methodology employed in this thesis. I feel privileged to have benefited from her expertise at a personal level also during the Summer School of Econometrics at the University of Copenhagen in 2012. I would like to sincerely thank Professor Masoud Karshenas both for his insightful feedback and for the diligent and encouraging responses that he generously offered to my questions. I am honored that I had the opportunity to work with and learn from him at such a level. My special thanks further go to Professor Finn Østrup, who kindly acted as the Committee Chair, for his thoughtful and constructive comments on various chapters of this thesis and for his support throughout the process of writing up this thesis. I am grateful to the Department of International Economics and Management at Copenhagen Business School. Among others, I am thankful to Professor Jens Gammelgaard, Professor Niels Mygind, Susanne Faurholdt and Evis Sinani for their academic, financial and administrative support during my stay at the Department. My special thanks go to Bente S. Ramovic for her kindness and boundless support during the assessment period. Combining the PhD studies with teaching was an enjoyable challenge. I would like to thank the Department for its assistance in the allocation of teaching hours and also my economics students for making the teaching experience such a pleasure for me. I would like to thank the Asia Research Centre at iii Copenhagen Business School and Professor Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard for making my studies at the Centre so enjoyable. I would like to thank the Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource-Rich Economies (OxCarre) at the University of Oxford for welcoming me during spring 2012. I would like to thank Professor Tony Venables and particularly Professor Frederik van der Ploeg who acted as my adviser during my stay at Oxford. I feel honored to have shared their insight on the subject of this study. I would like to thank the Centre for Euro-Asian Studies at the University of Reading and Professor Yelena Kalyuzhnova for her valuable comments on the subject of this study. I would also like to thank Professor Anthony D’Costa for his academic guidance. I would like to thank my wonderful and energizing PhD fellows, my inspiring friends and my supportive cousins for their ever-lasting love and their endless encouragement. My especial gratitude is given to my aunt who before passing away inspired me in many different ways in life and believed in me. I would like to thank my parents and my sister Melika for their unlimited love and support during the process of completion of this PhD thesis. Their love of knowledge inspired my choices in life and motivated me to embark on this rigorous and life-changing path. I would particularly like to thank my mother who was always ready to help and assisted me in many instances at the time when I most needed her. I would like to thank my baby girl Elina who remained an angel, adorable and cheerful in spite of the little attention I was able to give her at times. Last but not least, I would like to give my heartfelt thanks to my dear husband Stefan who with his intellect and great interest for science, boundlessly and continuously encouraged me, assisted me and cared for me during the process of writing this thesis. Thanks to him and his simplicity, many difficulties disappeared and many simple things looked wonderful and special. Needless to say, his devotion, sacrifice and patience along with his immense practical and emotional support carried me through the challenging times and made it possible for me to complete this PhD thesis. iv Dedicated to my parents to Stefan and to the memory of my aunt v vi ABSTRACT (IN ENGLISH) The central focus of this thesis is the identification of theory-consistent economic determinants of aggregate and sectoral domestic investment in the context of the oil-rich and oil-based economy of Iran within the theoretical framework of modified neoclassical-accelerator type investment models. This thesis further attempts to extend this theoretically consistent framework by incorporating oil-driven financial constraint measures such as specified by cash flow models. The latter is justified on the basis of the presence of imperfect capital markets in Iran and the inherent uncertainty associated with the availability of oil-driven finance for investment due to the unpredictable nature of oil prices. A CVAR method is being employed to determine the theory-consistent long-run relationships between the variables of interest during 1974-2011. Motivated by the existing gaps in the investment and natural resource curse literature, the main objectives of the thesis include investigating: (i) the extent to which the theoretical framework is able to explain investment in the Iranian context and the underlying reasons for the (expected) partial applicability of such a framework; (ii) the relation between oil and investment patterns; and (iii) sectoral shifts during the process of capital accumulation and the role of the state in this process. Hence, the findings of this thesis contribute to current debates in the literature on the economics of natural resources and on investment, as well as to the application of the investment literature in the context of oil-abundant and -dependent economies like Iran. The empirical results, interestingly, showed that aggregate investment largely corresponds to factors which lie within the above theoretical framework. Notably, such a framework made it possible to make inferences and to draw policy implications based on the theoretically motivated long-run relationships between economic determinants of investment. It further allowed exploring how well such a framework, in the context of partial-market oil-driven economies like Iran, was applicable with some modifications that were needed to make the framework more appropriate for such economies. Consistent with the predictions of the theory, at large, investment was strongly and positively related to output and the growth rate of capital in the long-run. Also, as expected by the theory, investment was negatively related to inflation, which was used as a proxy for the user cost of capital.