The Impact of Security on Economic Growth in Iran and Other Countries

Abstract

Due to different approaches to study security, there are several different indicators and policy recommendations for each of these approaches and they have different economic effects on societies. In this study the economic effects of traditional and new security approaches are studied by using different indicators, including indicators of the fragility of governments, perceived corruption, peace and military expenditure, for 135 countries in the period 2004 to 2014 and 2008 to 2014 by applying panel data method. The results show that factors of government fragility and military expenditure has negative impact on economic growth. The wider the extent of governments fragility, the less economic growth will be seen in those countries. The Relationship between "Corruption Perception Index" and economic growth shows that economic growth is high in the countries with less corruption in government sector. The study of the relationship between "Global Peace Index" and "government fragility index" with the investment in the countries show that global peace index has a positive impact and government fragility index has a negative impact on investment. In general, we can say the indices based on traditional approaches of security don’t have a positive impact on economic growth and, on the opposite side, the indices based on new approaches toward security have positive relation with economic factors, because they are structure-oriented and consider a wide range of factors leading to insecurity.

Keywords

• military expenditures
• fragile states index
• global peace index
• corruption perception index
• security