Effects of Financial Incentives and Economic Reforms in Agriculture on Income and Gender Inequality in Iran
Keywords:
Financial incentives, economic reforms in agriculture, income inequality, gender inequality, agricultural product pricesAbstract
Agriculture, as one of the most important economic sectors in Iran, plays a key role in ensuring food security, employment, and economic development. Despite the high importance of this sector, Iran’s agricultural structure faces widespread inequalities in various dimensions, including income inequality among farmers, regional inequality among provinces, and gender inequality in access to resources and opportunities. These inequalities have emerged due to multiple factors, such as differences in the distribution of natural resources, climatic diversity, unequal access to technology, institutional weaknesses, and inadequate support policies. The present study is applied in terms of purpose and descriptive–analytical in nature, and it falls within the category of ex post facto research covering the period from 1986 to 2023. This study examines the effects of financial incentives and economic reforms in agriculture on income and gender inequality in Iran. Using a Smooth Transition Regression (STR) model in which the transition variable is the price of agricultural products, the nonlinear relationship between financial incentives and economic reforms in agriculture and income and gender inequality in Iran is modeled in the presence of threshold effects of agricultural product prices. The estimation results of the nonlinear component of the income inequality model (regime two) indicate that the variables of credit facilities granted to the agricultural sector, development expenditures in agriculture, agricultural product prices, labor force, gross domestic product per capita, real exchange rate, and education level have a negative effect on income inequality in Iran and, based on the calculated probabilities for these variables, all of which are less than 0.05, they exert a statistically significant effect on income inequality at the 5% error level. In the second model, where the response variable is gender inequality, the estimation results of the nonlinear component of the model (regime two) indicate a positive relationship between the unemployment rate and inflation rate with gender inequality. In addition, the variable of financial incentives in the agricultural sector has a negative and statistically significant effect on gender inequality at the 95% confidence level.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Moein Sadeghi (Author); Shahriyar Nessabian; Nader Mehregan, Azadeh Mehrabian (Author)
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