| چکیده انگلیسی مقاله |
Purpose: The oil revenue is considered a key variable in economic policies, which has always been in the focus of politicians and economists as a key variable in developing economies. Oil revenue fluctuations are one of the limitations of economic growth and cause the withdrawal of resources from the economic cycle. Their allocation to activities with low productivity and efficiency reduces economic growth. In countries with an environment of low institutional quality, oil revenue fluctuations can encourage rent-seeking activities. This is especially true in less developed countries with a large public sector, inadequate management, and complex and inefficient tax systems. In Iran, due to the relatively large and inefficient public sector, low institutional levels, and rich natural resources, rent-seeking is rather prevalent. According to this discussion, the purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of oil revenues on tax revenues under conditions of tax rent-seeking. To this end, the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model (DSGE) is used to examine the period of 1991-2020. Rent seeking is the competition of individuals and the government for financial privileges. This competition is for subsidies, higher income transfers, and lower taxes. Therefore, the available resources are allocated to rent-seeking instead of productive activities. Among economic variables, oil revenues are a key indicator affecting macroeconomic performance. Until now, there has been no study on the effects of oil revenues on tax revenues under conditions of tax rent-seeking, as one of the country's economic challenges. The aim of the present study is to investigate this issue.
Methodology: The purpose of this research is to model Iran's economy under conditions of rent-seeking and increased oil revenues. In order to evaluate the effects of oil revenues on tax revenues, the general stochastic dynamic model was applied. The overall structure of the model designed in current research includes five main sectors: households, firms, oil, government, and the central bank. It resulted in 22 equations with 22 unknown variables. The employed data are the seasonal data of Iran’s economy for the period of 1991-2020 provided by the time series bank information of Iranian’s Central Bank and the Iranian Statistical Centre. After linearizing the model equations, the coefficients of the model were calculated using the quantification method. Then, the designed model was run in the Dynare software, and the instantaneous feedback results related to the shock of oil revenues were obtained.
Findings and discussion: The results indicate that an increase in the oil revenues initially leads to an increase in prices, imports and government's tax revenues, but, later on, due to the increase in the price and the decrease in purchasing power, the motivation of people for tax rent-seeking increases, and part of the tax revenues are not realized. This is consistent with both the theoretical foundations of the economy and the observed evidence in the country. However, the realization of oil revenues reduces the motivation of the government to create a precise tax system, and the government makes less effort to establish optimal tax systems and realize tax revenues, which leads to an increase in the motivation to tax revenues rent-seeking. In other words, tax evasion rises. Therefore, the motivation of households to reduce working hours and rent-seeking from the government's tax revenues increases. A part of the tax revenues, enters the household budget rather than the government budget, and the force labour devotes part of its productive working hours to non-productive work (rent-seeking).
Conclusions and policy implications: Furthermore, an increase in the oil revenues leads to decreased government's tax revenues under conditions of tax rent-seeking. Consequently, households are motivated to reduce the working hours, and rent-seeking from tax revenues increases. In Iran's economy, the tax system has been reformed over the past years, but, due to structural problems that are rooted in economic, cultural and political factors, the tax system is not efficient. A part of the tax revenues is included in the household budget instead of the government budget. Since, the reduction of rent-seeking leads to the increase of productive activities, it is suggested that economic policy makers formulate tax systems so as to limit the space for earning rent in the country. Through increasing productive activities, reducing transaction costs, improving productivity, increasing investment, and ensuring greater transparency and stability of monetary and financial policies, the government can play an important role in the institutional quality of the society and thus reduce the tendency of people for rent-seeking. |