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International Symposium "Sanctions and Iranian Political Economy: Lessons and the Way Forward"
Time: 22.11.2013 09:00 h - 22.11.2013 18:00 h
Venue: Hörsaal CNMS, Deutschhausstr. 12, 35032 Marburg
Speakers:
Kjetil Bjorvatn (Norway); Ghassan Dibeh (Lebanon); Sajjad Faraji Dizaji (Iran); Mohammad R. Farzanegan (Germany); Hassan Hakimian (United Kingdom); Alireza Naghavi (Italy); and Clément Therme (Switzerland)
More Information:
In cooperation with Iranian Studies department, Middle East Economics department is organizing a one day symposium about “Sanctions and Iranian Political Economy: lessons and the way forward”.
In a nutshell, our international symposium aims to address the following main questions:
• What are the concrete effects of the financial and oil sanctions on the Iranian economy?
• Can economic sanctions increase the willingness for reform and improve the quality of democratic institutions?
• Will the Iranian economy be able to use the ongoing sanctions to reduce the dependency on oil revenues, diversify the economy, increase the share of taxes in the budget and finally change the curse of sanctions into a blessing?
• How does the shadow economy respond to economic and energy sanctions?
• Can energy sanctions against Iran destabilize the international oil markets?
This would be the first scholarly symposium which address the political economy aspects of ongoing sanctions. Our speakers will talk about following topics:
• Power balance, economic sanctions, and rent seeking in Iran
• Historical and comparative aspects of sanctions
• The empowering power of economic sanctions
• Sanctions and the Iranian shadow economy
• Sanctions and the stability of the ruling system
• Consequences of sanctions for both EU energy security and Iranian oil and gas sectors
We will have a panel discussion at the end of symposium, summarizing the important lessons from ongoing sanctions and future of Iran.
The lectures and panel discussion are open to the public.
List of Speakers / Members of Panel Discussion
Kjetil Bjorvatn (NHH Norwegian School of Economics, Norway)
“Power Balance, Economic Sanctions, and rent seeking in Iran”
Kjetil Bjorvatn is professor of economics at NHH Norwegian School of Economics, the leading business school in Norway. Bjorvant’s main fields of research are Economic development, Political Economy, and Public Economics. His contributions on the case of Iran are "Destructive competition: Factionalism and rent-seeking in Iran” (2008, World Development), and "Resource Curse and Power Balance: Evidence from Iran” (Review of Middle East Economics and Finance). His other research is published in European Economic Review, European Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Public Economics, and Journal of Urban Economics among others.
Ghassan Dibeh (Lebanese American University)
"Panel Discussion Member"
Ghassan Dibeh is Professor of Economics and Chair of the Department of Economics at the Lebanese American University. He holds a B.A. in Physics and MA and PhD in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin. He is the editor of the journal Review of Middle East Economics and Finance published by De Gruyter Press. His research appeared in journals Physica A, Review of Political Economy, Energy Economics, Computational Economics, Journal of International Development and Middle Eastern Studies and in edited books. He served as senior economic advisor at the Ministry of Labor in Lebanon. He also held consultancy positions in projects related to economic development in Lebanon.
Sajjad Faraji Dizaji (Tarbiat Modares University, Iran)
"Could Iranian Sanctions Work? ‘Yes’ and ‘No’, but not ‘Perhaps’"
Sajjad Faraji is Assistant Professor of Economics at the Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran. His PhD dissertation was about "Inflation, economic growth, exports and oil shocks in an oil based economy (case study of Iran)". His main fields of research are the political economy of natural resources, economic sanctions, effects of oil shocks on the macroeconomy, and development economics. His recent joint study with Peter A.G. van Bergeijk entitled "Potential early phase success and ultimate failure of economic sanctions: A VAR approach with an application to Iran" is just published in the Journal of Peace Research. We appreciate the support of the DAAD for his participation in the Symposium.
Mohammad Reza Farzanegan (CNMS, Germany)
"International Sanctions and the Iranian Shadow Economy"
Mohammad R. Farzanegan is Professor and chair of the Middle East Economics at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies (CNMS) of Philipps-University of Marburg in Germany. In 2010, he was awarded the Georg Forster Research Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His PhD study at Dresden University of Technology was mainly focused on the examination of political economy of Iran. His main fields of research are the political economy of natural resources, quality of governance, demographic transition and shadow economy. He got his MS and BA degrees in Energy Economics and Theoretical Economics from Tehran University and Allameh Tabatabai University, respectively. He is affiliated with CESifo Network (Munich), Economic Research Forum (ERF, Cairo), Marburg Centre for Institutional Economics (MACIE, Marburg) and Center of Public Economics (CEPE, Dresden). He has several publications in internationally refereed journals such as Applied Economics, Defence and Peace Economics, Ecological Economics, Economics Bulletin, Energy Economics, European Journal of Political Economy, International Journal of Strategic Property Management, SAIS Review, and World Development. He is in Advisory Board of the Middle East – Topics & Arguments.
Hassan Hakimian (SOAS, UK)
“Economic Sanctions: Foreign Policy Tool or Weapon of Mass Destruction?”
Hassan Hakimian is the MBI Al Jaber Director of the London Middle East Institute and a Reader in the Department of Economics at SOAS. Previously, he was an Associate Dean at Cass Business School, City University, where he led international business education programmes in China (Shanghai) and the Middle East (Dubai). During a ten-year period between 1993 and 2002, Hassan was at the SOAS Department of Economics where he directed an award-winning postgraduate international distance learning programme, and taught various courses including Applied Economic Development of the Middle East. His research is focused on the Middle East and covers human resources and demographic change, labour markets and employment policy, and globalization and economic integration. He is the author of Labour Transfer and Economic Development (1990) and co-editor of The State and Global Change (2000), and Trade Policy and Economic Integration in MENA (2003). He has published in various academic journals and acted as consultant to international development agencies. He is a Research Fellow at the Economic Research Forum, a network of Middle East economists based in Cairo, and is also an active member of the Middle East Economic Association of the USA. He is the founder and Series Editor for the “Routledge Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa”, which has produced a number of pertinent titles dealing with MENA’s economies.
Alireza Naghavi (University of Bologna, Italy)
“Religion, the State, and Resilience Against Economic Sanctions”
Alireza Naghavi has been an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Bologna since November 2008 and adjunct professor at John Hopkins University. He is also a consultant at the World Intellectual Property Organ ization. He was an assistant professor at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia from 2005 to 2008. He obtained a Master degree in Economics at the University of Konstanz (Germany) in 2000 and a Ph.D in Economics at University College Dublin (Ireland) in 2004. He was a CEPR post-doc research fellow at the Paris School of Economics (France) from 2003 to 2005, and was visiting scholar in the following institutions: Norwegian School of Economics (Norway, 2007), Kobe Univeresity (Japan, 2008), University of New South Wales (Australia, 2010), University of Lille 1 (France, 2010), and Academia Sinica (Taiwan, 2011 and 2012). He has published in international journals such as Economic Theory, Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Economic Inquiry, Health Economics, Review of International Economics, Review of World Economics, European Journal of Political Economy. He coordinated a European research project (FP7) titled INGINEUS at Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei in the period of 2009-2011. His research interests are in the fields of international trade, technological innovation, political economy and the economics of religion. In particular, his current research projects focus on international trade and migration, intellectual property rights and innovation and institutions, religion and development.
Clément Therme (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
“Consequences of Sanctions for both EU Energy Security and Iranian Oil and Gas Sectors”
Clément Therme is a postdoctoral fellow of the Faculty of theology at the University of Geneva. He is also a Research Associate at the Centre d’études turques, ottomanes, balkaniques et centrasiatiques (CETOBAC) and at the Centre d’Analyse et d’Intervention Sociologiques (CADIS) of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS, Paris). He is the author of Les Relations entre Téhéran et Moscou depuis 1979 (PUF, 2012). He is also the coeditor (with Houchang E. Chehabi and Farhad Khosrokhavar) of a book entitled Iran and the Challenges of the Twenty-First Century (Mazda Publishers, 2013).
Organizer:
Centrum für Nah- und Mittelost-Studien (CNMS), Mohammad Reza Farzanegan / Wirtschaft des Nahen und Mittleren Ostens & Christoph Werner / Iranistik
Sponsors:
Doris und Dr. Michael Hagemann-Stiftung, DAAD, Gerda Henkel Stiftung and Ursula-Kuhlmann-Fonds
Contact:
Please contact Prof. Mohammad Reza Farzanegan if you would like to access any of presented works.