تثبیت‌کنندگی خودکار سیاست‌های مالی و چرخه‌های اقتصادی ایران

Introduction: The economy of a country undergoes many fluctuations over time. Due to dependence on oil revenues, war, embargo and other economic and political tensions, Iran's economy has been fluctuating greatly and experiencing many periods of prosperity and recession in the last thirty years. One of the duties defined for governments in public finance is economic stabilization. Economic stabilization makes the path of economic growth smoother. The smoothing of the growth path also makes the economic environment more attractive for investment and production. Governments have different instrument for economic stabilization. These instruments affect the supply and demand system. One of the policies that affects the demand side of the economy is the financial policies. These policies are divided into two categories: discretionary and non-discretionary. Discretionary financial policies were criticized by economists such as Friedman. Critics state that discretionary policies do not have the appropriate speed to stabilize the economic fluctuations. Automatic stabilizers, however, are not discretionary policies and can respond appropriately to criticism. The purpose of this research is to investigate the effect of the automatic stabilization of financial policies, especially tax policies, on Iran's business cycles.
Methodology: The data collection of this research was done through library work. The data were collected from the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the National Statistics Center. The data were seasonal, ranging from the spring of 1993 to the autumn of 2018. The business cycle of Iran's economy was extracted using the Hodrick-Prescott filter. According to the studies conducted, the ʎ of the extraction filter was 677. The unit root was calculated using the KPSS test. All the variables at this level were stationary. By estimating a SVAR model, we tried to check the dynamic relationships among the variables. The tools that were used in structural vector autoregressive models were impulse response functions, forecast error variance decomposition and historical decomposition. The counterfactual analysis was based on historical decomposition.
Results and Discussion: The SVAR model was formulated with the impulse response functions for twenty periods. According to the results, the effect of the government expenditure shock on the business cycle is low, but it shows up positive. The effect of the indirect tax shock on the cycle of GDP is very small and negligible. The effect of the direct tax shock on the business cycle is estimated counter-cyclically and found to be of a low effect.
The results of the variance decomposition show that, in the first period, more than 92% of the change in the business cycle is explained by itself, 5% by the government expenditure shock, 1% by the direct taxes shock, and very small amounts by the indirect taxes shock. After 20 periods, the contribution of the business cycle in explaining its own changes decreases by less than 5%. Most of this share is added to the share of the government expenditure shock, raising it to 9.27% to explain the changes in the business cycle. After twenty periods, direct and indirect taxes are only equal to 2 and 1%, respectively, and they serve as the cause of changes in the production cycle.
Historical decomposition shows that in the period from 1993 to 2018, direct taxes had a small contribution to the business cycles of Iran's economy, but there were countercyclical effects on the business cycle different years. These effects can be seen during both boom and recession. Indirect taxes have had counter-cyclical effects only in a few years, which have only been anti-prosperity. Historical decomposition shows that government spending has been able to exert anti-cyclical effects in some cases, though negligible.
Conclusion: According to empirical studies and the financial structure of the Iranian government, it was expected that the effects of stabilizing taxes on the production cycle would be insignificant. The tax ratio on GDP in Iran is about one third of the usual rate in the world. What matters was the way these taxes were effective; they affect the GDP in a pro-cyclical or counter-cyclical way. In this research, an attempt was made to investigate the role of taxes and the automatic stabilization of the government's financial policies in the economy of Iran. The results showed that, in terms of quantity, the government spending has a greater effect on stabilizing the economy (although this effect is small). However, in terms of counter recession effects, direct taxes can have a good stabilizing effect on the production cycle in the economy, although it is natural that the contribution of few tax revenues from the government's revenues in terms of quantity does not have a significant effect on the current economy of Iran. By increasing the share of tax revenues from the total revenues of the government, it is hoped that the counter recessionary effects of direct taxes will help stabilize (automatically) Iran's economy and reduce some of the economic fluctuations of the country's production. It is suggested that the government's financial policy should be made with special attention to direct taxes. By increasing the share of direct taxes, there will be fairer taxation as well as a relative improvement in fluctuations at the country's macroeconomic level.