The poor and the gasoline price hike
Since the announcement of the gasoline price hike on Friday November 15, events in Iran have taken a tragic turn with loss of life and destruction of property. They also took a perplexing turn. Three days after the price increase and the vague promise of cash compensation for the price hike, on Monday the government announced it was putting the promised money into people’s bank accounts. If the compensation scheme was ready, why not announce it with the price increase? I am not sure if it would have prevented the unrest altogether, but at least there would have been one fewer grievance. (more…)
Iran’s gasoline price hike misses lesson from Iran’s own experience
This Friday, as Iranians were getting ready for their day off, they were rudely greeted with a surprise government announcement — a sharp increase in the price of gasoline. Within hours they in turn surprised the government by rioting in several small and large cities. Worldwide, riots and protests almost always follow gasoline price hikes, Mexico in 2017 and Paris 2018 are the latest examples. The price increase came with rationing and a two-tier price. Rationed gas of 60 liters per month is set to sell for 5000 rials (500 toman) per liter and the free market gas for 30000 rials. Rationed gasoline accounts for roughly one-third of the total supply of about 90 million liters per day, so, taking into account the much higher price of the free market, the overall price increase is more than 100 percent. The logic of the price increase is not in dispute, but the way it was done shows that an important lesson from the last price hike, in 2010, has not been learned. The lesson is this: cash compensation is an integral part of the removal of subsidies, and for a distressed and incredulous public, government promises to pay are not the same as money in the bank.
Rising employment casts doubt on IMF’s grim forecast for Iran’s economy
In October, the IMF downgraded its forecast of Iran’s economic growth for 2019 from -6 to -9.5 percent. The adjustment brought the IMF’s assessment of Iran’s economic performance closer to that of the World Bank (-8.7 percent) and is revising opinion regarding the ineffectiveness of sanctions in forcing Iran to renegotiate the 2015 nuclear deal. It has strengthened the hand of Iran foes who argue that sanctions are about to bear fruit and urge the Trump administration to stay the course and ignore appeals from Europeans to ease pressure on Iran.
The Financial Times, quoting an unnamed Iranian economist, added alarm to the downgrading by suggesting that Iran’s situation may be worse than it was during the Iran-Iraq war or the Anglo-Soviet occupation of Iran during World War 2. The idea that life in Iran is anything like the 1940s or the 1980s is nonsense, and the FT reporter who files her reports from Tehran can (but did not) attest to that. It is easy to dismiss this comparison as silly, but the dire predictions of sharp contraction by IMF and the World Bank for the year should be taken seriously. And by seriously I mean to ask why they are at odds with new employment data from Iran. (more…)
Good news for Iran from the inflation front
Good economic news greets President Rouhani as he arrives in New York for the UN General Assembly this week: a declining trend of inflation. According to the latest consumer price index data published by the Statistical Center of Iran, during the Iranian month of Shahrivar (August 21-September20, 2019) inflation reached its lowest level since Trump’s assault on Iran’s economy began 18 months ago: the CPI increased at an annual rate of just 6.1 percent. When Trump reimposed sanctions in May 2018, inflation was quite low: 2.7 percent annually in March 2018 and rose to 126.7 percent in October. It has declined more or less continuously from that peak since (see graph of the 3-month moving average below). (more…)
Can Iran’s economy restructure to minimize the impact of sanctions?
In a post published on Lobelog.com today, I ask if Iran’s economy is sliding. Available data do not allow me to answer this question one way or the other, but they do undermine the claim of doomsayers that the economy is on the verge of collapse.
A lot rides on the answer to this question, however, and I do not have more to say on it here. There is no doubt that in the standoff between Iran and the US, time is on the US side. They can wait this out for a very long time, at least as long as Iran keeps to its promise not to develop nuclear weapons. The question is then how quickly and to what degree will Iran’s economic situation deteriorate in the next year or so. If the economic clock for Iran runs out fast, we should expect it to resort to asymmetric responses and further instability in the Persian Gulf. If, as the data hints, the economy is stabilizing, albeit at a lower level, Iran could decide to use the sanction years (how long?) to restructure its economy away from oil and toward domestic production.
The reforms needed to do so range from reform of education and banking systems to better management of the exchange rate. If the government is working on a strategy to achieve all this, I do not know. But, when the big economic news from Iran is about kicking 800,000 rich people off the cash transfer roll, I have doubts. To be bust saving about $50 million a year when the economy is losing 5-10 percentage point in lost economic growth (worth $50 billion) a year, does not make sense.
Is Iran’s inflation rising?
The most recent report on consumer prices (link in Persian) published by the Statistical Center of Iran (SCI) last week shows that prices rose faster in Tir 1398 (June 21 to July 20, 2019) than they did in the preceding two months. Low inflation rates during Ordibehesht (roughly, May) and Khordad (June), 19 percent and 10 percent (measured annually), seemed to signal that the cost push inflation of 2018 may be working its way out of the system. But, the sharp increase in Tir prices, 38 percent annually, three times as fast as the previous month, may suggest otherwise. The dollar in the free market responded quickly, jumping above 120,000 rials per dollar. (more…)
Fact checking the meat consumption of Iranians
The rapid increase in the price of meat in the last few months has turned this food item of dubious health value into the lightning rod for the suffering of Iranian consumers. Viewers of the BBC Persian program may recall a stark graphic that purported to show that the amount of red meat that a minimum wage worker could buy has declined from 74 kg per month in 1357 (1978) to 10 kg in 1397 (2018). (more…)
Is Iran’s economic slide bottoming out?
Last year, Iran’s economy was hit hard by sanctions. The US withdrawal from the nuclear deal and the return of unilateral US sanctions turned 10 quarters of economic growth into (so far) four quarters of negative growth (see graph below). During the year that ended on March 20, 2019, the economy shrank by nearly 5%, and further contraction is very likely this year. The 5% decline was led by manufacturing, which fell by 12% in the last quarter of 1397 (winter 2019) relative to the same quarter a year ago. Non-oil GDP fell by less since agriculture and services, which account for 3/4 of the GDP are less dependent on trade (services actually grew slightly). (more…)
A note on measuring living standards
A few weeks ago, in this blog and in opinion pieces (here, here and here), I argued that during the three decades since the end of the war with Iraq (1988), Iran’s economic growth exceeded that of Turkey, such that by 2012, when US sanctions intensified, living standards in the two countries were very similar. My analysis, which surprised some and angered others, is because of the particular data I used to measure GDP per capita (which I also refer to as the living standard). GDP comparison is not rocket science but most journalists (and even many economists) often get it wrong. So, in this post I try to explain why it is important that we use data specifically intended for such comparisons.
The gold standard to measure change in household welfare in Iran
The anniversary of the Islamic Revolution 40 years ago this month coincided with the deepest economic crisis Iran has experienced since the war with Iraq in the 1980s. As top Trump administration officials, who wished the crisis on ordinary Iranians in the hope of enlisting their help in regime change, excitement among the Iranian opposition abroad is palpable. The occasion has also stimulated discussion of success and failure of the revolution concerning a wide range of issues and metrics. Much of the discussion involved comparison of living standards in Iran between now and in the 1970s (read my own comparison in Project Syndicate here.) (more…)
Tyranny of numbers 
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