The relationship between economic growth and consumption in Iraq for the period 1990-2014

الملخص

Consensus is almost complete among economists that consumption is the ultimate goal of economic activity, without it there is no incentive to production, diversification of outputs and renewal of its sources, and accordingly consumption is the essential variable of double characteristic, it is a dependent variable on the one hand for changes in personal income, and independent depends on the expansion of its circle GDP growth rates on the other hand, and this study comes to measure the impact of sudden changes that have occurred on the purchasing power of Iraqi society due to the wars, the blockade and the security disturbances, i.e. consumer capacity, on the paths of economic growth in Iraq for the period from 1990-2014, based on the premise that the deterioration of consumption rates and the distortion of the structure of the consumer basket of the Iraqi individual necessarily led to a clear decline in the rates of economic growth, which was not compensated by the increase in production rates in the commodity sectors even with the exclusion of the “oil component” from the national income accounts, and they were correct. This hypothesis, but with one reservation, is that it was not inevitable if the development paths were changed from the "rentier" approach to a strategy to satisfy basic needs and self-reliance. We have distributed our study on three axes, the first came in theory, and the second in descriptive monitoring of the development of consumption phenomenon in Iraq, while the third axis is concerned with measuring the relationship between the two main variables, gross domestic product, and consumption.