The Impact of Domestic and Foreign Monetary Policy on Iran's economy: Global Modeling

Abstract

One of the striking features of the business cycles is the patterns of co-movement of output, inflation, interest rates, and real equity prices across countries. This paper empirically examines the effects of domestic and foreign monetary policies on Iran's macroeconomic variables (including real production, inflation, short-term interest rate, and real exchange rate) using quarterly data over the 1996Q1-2015Q4 period and a global vector auto-regression model (GVAR) for Iran, the largest trading partners of Iran including China, India, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, the European Union, and the United State. The results of domestic monetary policies on Iran's macroeconomic variables illustrate a form of Price Puzzle on how monetary policy shocks affect inflation in Iran. The effects of the positive shocks of domestic interest rate on real GDP in Iran is negative. Iran's real exchange rate response to the positive shock of domestic interest rates is negative and significant. The results regarding the impact of the foreign monetary policies on Iran's macroeconomic variables illuminate that only the effects of a positive shock to China's interest rate are significant and negative on Iran's inflation. Besides, there is a significant independency of Iran's real GDP to the monetary policy shocks of the other trading partners of Iran. Also, the response of Iran's real exchange rate to positive monetary shocks in the EU and Turkey is at a positive and significant level. The results indicate that due to the closed economic structure of Iran, global economic crises that lead to a recession in other countries have had the least impact on the Iranian economy.