An Economic Analysis of Iran’s 2017 Judicial System Reforms: Ways with Long-term Effects to Improve Judicial System’s Litigation Delay

Abstract

Litigation delay is a serious concern for judicial systems. In 2017, Iran enacted regulations for digitizing the judicial system in order to address this problem. This article shows whether this new policy has been an efficient move and shows solutions with more long-term results for overcoming the litigation delay. To analyze the recent reforms' efficiency, I review Iran's dispute resolution performance using secondary data from Doing Business research and the Research Center of the Iranian parliament reports in measuring the doing business environmentfrom 2016, before adopting those regulations, and then until 2019. Finally, it is concluded that Law & Economics methodology is a suitable methodology for analyzing the efficiency of 2017 Iran’s policy, which also provides ways to achieve more sustainable results to overcome the litigation delay. The main finding of this study is that according to the Kaldor-Hicks efficiency, Iran's recent reforms related to digitizing the judicial system have been an efficient move; however, due to the nature of these reforms, this efficiency does not last permanently.