Investigating the impact of economic sanctions and exchange rate fluctuations on Iran's imports

Articles in Press

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Faculty of Management and Economics, Lorestan University, Khorramabad, Iran

2 PhD student in Monetary Economics, Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran.

10.22034/ecoj.2025.66577.3417

Abstract

Economic sanctions against the Iranian economy have inevitably affected the value of the national currency and international trade flows. On the other hand, sanctions have affected people's expectations and have also increased exchange rate fluctuations. Understanding this importance, the aim of the present study is to examine the impact of economic sanctions and exchange rate fluctuations on Iran's imports during the period 1991-2023. This study contains two innovations; first, it considers the sanctions imposed on the Iranian economy with three different ratings: mild, moderate, and strong; and second, since numerous visible and invisible factors can affect a country's imports, it uses a fuzzy regression model to fit the model. The findings of this study show that with increasing exchange rate fluctuations, transaction risk for importers has increased and therefore the inflow of imports has decreased. Also, the fuzzy coefficients of the dummy variables of sanctions indicate that with the imposition of sanctions, in addition to limiting the inflow of goods and services into the country, the cost of imported goods has also increased, and for this reason, the ratio of imports to Iran's GDP has experienced a significant decrease. Comparing the symmetric triangular fuzzy coefficients of the model under study, it can also be concluded that the main obstacle to imports into Iran is the strong sanctions, which have cast a shadow over other factors like a high wall and have severely reduced the inflow of goods and services.

Keywords

Main Subjects

Applied Theories of Economics

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 16 December 2025

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics