A Sociological Study on the Impacts of Iran's Oil Revenues with an Emphasis on Consumer Life Style

Abstract

Investigating the subject of consumption from the theoretical aspect has turned into an important subject in sociology. The popularity and constancy of consumerism have caused waste of resources and lack of flourishing and in the long run, it can lead to undesirable political, economic and social consequences. Therefore, because of the importance of the consumer life style and the fluctuations in the oil revenues in recent years, this paper aims to investigate the social impacts of oil revenues in Iran, emphasizing consumer life style. To do this, in the theoretical basis section, the opinions of Simmel, Keynes and Rentier state theory from interpretations by Hazem Al Beblawi, Luciani and Mahdavy and also the Dutch disease theory are used.  This is a descriptive-explanatory study that is done using scaling based on secondary data analysis and the data were collected by referring to the Central Bank website and statistics yearbooks of different years. According to the study's descriptive findings, oil revenues and consumer life style had a generally rising trend during the years 1971 to 2012 and with the increase in oil revenues, consumerism has also increased. The only falling trends took place during the governments after the revolution and the time of the war. According to evidences, governments during these years are categorized as Rentier states.  Based on the study's explanatory findings, the urbanism coefficient, Rentier state and the government's consumptive policies were excluded from the regression equation and the two coefficients of oil revenues and imports cover all the coefficients.