Years of life lost to revolution and war in Iran

• Published date: 01 November 2023
• Author: Mohammad Reza Farzanegan
• Date: 01 November 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/rode.13030

REGULAR ARTICLE

Years of life lost to revolution and war in Iran

Mohammad Reza Farzanegan

1,2,3

1

Economics of the Middle East Research

Group, Center for Near and Middle

Eastern Studies (CNMS) & School of

Business and Economics, Philipps-

Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany

2

CESifo, Munich, Germany

3

ERF, Cairo, Egypt

Correspondence

Mohammad Reza Farzanegan,

Economics of the Middle East Research

Group, Center for Near and Middle

Eastern Studies (CNMS) & School of

Business and Economics, Philipps-

Universität Marburg, Deutschhausstr.

12, 35032 Marburg, Germany.

Email: farzanegan@uni-marburg.de,

Web: https://www.uni-marburg.de/cnms/

wirtschaft

Abstract

How was life expectancy in Iran affected by the Islamic

Revolution and subsequent war with Iraq? This study

examines the joint effect of regime change and the war

against Iraq on life expectancy in Iran between 1978

and 1988. If there had been no revolution and war in

Iran, how would the life expectancy of Iranians have

developed? To answer this question, we use a synthetic

control model to construct a counterfactual Iran based

on a weighted average of other comparable countries,

which reproduces the situation of pre-revolution Iran

but does not experience the revolution and war. We

then compare the life expectancies of the counterfac-

tual and actual Iran that underwent a regime change

and war with Iraq. Our results indicate that an average

Iranian's total life expectancy would have been approx-

imately five years longer without the revolution and

war. The revolution had a moderate long-term impact

on total life expectancy at birth, with the most signifi-

cant influence being attributed to the war itself, partic-

ularly on male life expectancy. Our main findings are

robust to a series of tests, including placebo tests. We

investigate possible reasons that may explain the

impact on longevity.

KEYWORDS

conflict, human costs, Iran, Iraq, life expectancy, revolution,

sanctions, synthetic control method, treatment effect, war

Received: 5 October 2022Revised: 3 June 2023Accepted: 4 July 2023

DOI: 10.1111/rode.13030

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits

use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or

adaptations are made.

© 2023 The Author. Review of Development Economics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Rev Dev Econ. 2023;27:2061–2103. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/rode 2061

JEL CLASSIFICATION

C23, H56, F51, D74, Q34

1|INTRODUCTION

The increasing trend of violence and conflict worldwide, especially following the Russian inva-

sion of Ukraine, has intensified the discussions on the socioeconomic consequences of such sig-

nificant violence and instabilities. The detrimental effects of political turmoil and violence

extend beyond economic costs and the destruction of infrastructure to also include substantial

human losses. Beyond the lives lost to conflict and violence, the younger generation in such

cases will experience different types of psychological trauma. Therefore, conflict and violence

may exert a persistent effect on people's health and well-being. Against this background, a bet-

ter understanding of the effects of major political events, such as revolutions, and main types of

violence, such as wars, on different aspects of socioeconomic development plays a critical role

in designing relevant policies that help mitigate the costly consequences of such events for

affected countries, regions, and global community.

This research looks at the Islamic Revolution in Iran at the end of the 1970s, which sur-

prised the global community (see Kurzman, 2005 on the unthinkable revolution in Iran) and

ended the long reign of the monarchy.

1

According to Kurzman (2005), the anti-shah protests

and general strikes in Iran were a hugely popular uprising in world history, with at least 10% of

the population participating. This is a greater proportion than the number of people who took

part in the French revolution (less than 2%) and the overthrow of Soviet communism (less

than 1%).

Open resistance against the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and political system started in

February 1977 and worsened in 1978 (Kurzman, 2005 provides a detailed picture of revolution

timeline).

2

By February 1979, the Shah fled into exile and the monarchy collapsed. Using the

political instability and internal chaos in Iran as an opportunity, the Iraqi army, under leader-

ship of Saddam Hussein, invaded Iran in 1980. An armed conflict started with Iraq and lasted

eight years (for a historical review see Zunes, 2009, and Seeberg, 2014). The economic costs of

the Islamic revolution and war with Iraq are examined by different studies such as in

Amirahmadi (1990), Mofid (1990), Jahan-Parvar (2016), and Farzanegan (2022a).

The Iranian Revolution, according to Kurzman (2005), resulted in significantly fewer casual-

ties compared to other movements. For example, while the South African anti-apartheid move-

ment led to over 7000 revolutionary martyrs, the numbers in Iran were much lower. The

Martyr Foundation identified 744 martyrs in Tehran, which was the main center of the Islamic

revolution. Kurzman (2005, p. 71) cites figures from the coroner's office and Tehran's main cem-

etery, Behesht Zahra, which reported 895 and 768 martyrs, respectively. However, as these

numbers only focus on Tehran, they may be considered a lower bound for the number of vic-

tims from the revolution.

Kurzman also references an original study conducted in 1982 by Sohbatollah Amrai, an

employee of the Martyr Foundation, who researched the number of deaths directly related to the

revolution. Amraiexcluded deaths from accidents and natural causes or those assassinated by rev-

olutionary forces.He then compared his foundation figures against the records of the Tehran cor-

oner's office and the main Tehran cemetery. The comparison showed similar or closefigures,

indicating that around 700–900 Iranians died in Tehran during theyear of the revolution.

2062 FARZANEGAN

The Iraq invasion of Iran in 1980, which materialized because the revolution and change in

the balance of power in the Middle East, caused far more human and economic losses. This

remains the deadliest war in the history of the Middle East (Razoux, 2015). It was also the lon-

gest war of the 20th century. Razoux (2015, p. 471) presents more reliable data on thetotal casu-

alties of this war, which stood at 680,000 dead and missing. Iran's share of the total death and

missing was about 73% (500,000 Iranians), with an additional 1.5 million people wounded

and maimed. 85% of those who died were soldiers and the number of Iranian soldier deaths

was 3.5 times higher than that of Iraqis. The number of civilians killed by bombings was about

3% of the overall death toll. The remaining 12% of civilian deaths were Kurds who were killed

by both Iraqis and Iranians. Around 115,000 soldiers were taken prisoner (70,000 Iraqis and

45,000 Iranians).

The war was also associated with significant material losses, which we do not examine here.

Apart from material military damages, the financial costs of the war were also significant. The

total financial cost of the war to Iran is estimated to be $645 billion, including loss of oil reve-

nues ($350 billion), damage to infrastructure ($180 billion), loss of industrial revenues ($35 bil-

lion), compensation to casualties' families ($25 billion), purchase of war equipment ($20

billion), expenses related to war efforts ($20 billion), importing of refined petroleum products

($12 billion), and an increase in insurance premiums (oil trade) of $3 billion. For Iraq, the total

costs were $452 billion.

It is also important to note that during the war period, Iran was under US sanctions after

the US embassy hostage crisis following the revolution. However, these estimated figures do not

show the opportunity costs of war. Farzanegan (2022a) calculated the income loss for the aver-

age Iranian during 1978–1988 resulting from the revolution and war, with an estimated number

of an annual loss of about $3150 per Iranian. These estimations also do not measure the long-

term psychological effects of the experience of war conditions (Farzanegan & Gholipour, 2021).

Table A1 in Appendix Asummarizes the war-related human losses for Iran and Iraq and

Table A2 presents the financial costs of the war for Iran and Iraq.

Our focus and contribution are to measure the human costs of a major political event,

which was also attached to a destructive war. We aim to understand how Iranian life expec-

tancy could have developed in the absence of the revolution and war and to find the indepen-

dent effects of revolution and war on the longevity of Iranians. This is a challenging task as one

may argue that some of the socioeconomic factors which led to the revolution

(e.g., demographic development, economic condition, etc.) were also responsible for subsequent

changes in the overall health indicators of Iranians. As mentioned by Holland (1986), one of

the main problems of causality analysis is that the unit of intervention cannot be obtained with-

out that specific treatment. In other words, it is impossible to experience our unit of interest

with and without of treatment at the same time. Therefore, the challenge of causal analysis is

in the estimation of a synthetic unit which best reproduces the factual unit of interest under

treatment.

Our approach, based on the synthetic control method (SCM), helps to build a counterfactual

Iran which was similar to Iran but does not undergo a revolution and war.

3

Using the SCM

approach, we quantify the magnitude of years of life lost due to the revolution and war in Iran.

We explore the possible reasons for the estimated effect and thus contribute to our understand-

ing of the mortality impact of war and regime change between the male and female

populations.

4

The study is structured as follows: Section 2provides a brief review of the literature on life

expectancy on growth and the demography of conflict. In Section 3, we explain the data and

FARZANEGAN 2063