Pathology of Foreign Investment Attraction in Iran from 1978 to 2024 Based on a Process Model in Public Policymaking

Abstract

Attracting foreign investment as one of the key tools for economic development has always been of interest to policymakers. However, Iran has faced numerous challenges in this regard in the last four decades. Although researchers consider factors such as economic factors, sanctions, and political uncertainty, etc. in analyzing the challenges facing foreign investment in Iran, the present study, in the form of a process model, considers foreign investment attraction in Iran to have structural and executive obstacles at all stages of the public policy-making process. The question to ponder is why despite the attention of the policy-making agencies to the importance and necessity of attracting foreign investment in the country, the performance in the period examined in this article has been very poor. As evidence of the claim, the highest figure for attracting foreign investment in Iran was in 2012, at 4.5 billion USD. After that, foreign capital attraction in the country began a downward trend and reached its lowest level in the past 20 years in 2015, at 945 million USD; Or following the signing of the JCPOA, the amount of foreign investment in Iran increased in 2016, until after the US completely withdrew from the JCPOA, the amount of foreign investment decreased sharply again in 2019 and reached about one billion dollars. The results of this study, which were extracted by using a descriptive-analytical method and by examining data related to foreign investment in Iran, show that foreign investment attraction policy over the past four decades has been seriously ineffective due to the followings: state-oriented, politicized, and disregard for global procedures and the inefficiency of the bureaucracy, lack of coherence in tools and structures, lack of use of scientific, methodical, and logical data-based processes, and the employment of an interactive model. As a result, it has not been very successful in achieving the desired goals.