Right before Ebrahim Raisi, the Iran regime’s president took the office, he and his economic team introduced a 7000-page economic program for the next 4 years. Now, ten months after Raisi’s inauguration, it seems that this program has been lost as there is no trace of it in Iran’s sinking economy.
Many of the regime’s economic experts are warning about the lack of a qualified economic program, with the consequences of a raging society against the regime. However, it seems that the regime has other priorities such as repression of public protests.
The economists believe that the cabinet of Raisi’s mismanagement of the economy “has led to the increase of the government’s current expenditures and is a generator and resonator of a stable inflation.”
Now after ten months, the representatives of all strata are protesting the regime, because of poverty, discrimination, corruption, and high prices.
On June 11, the regime’s concerned economic experts warned that “the government’s policy, dubbed ‘economic surgery,’ is very hasty and implemented without any preparation, and is only a temporary measure to solve the urgent problem of the budget deficit, and is not a program called economic reform.”
In the article that was published on the state-run website Darayan, they asked Raisi: “Didn’t you promise to address important issues such as inflation, unemployment, and the closure of businesses, with your 7,000-page reform program with the support of dozens of research institutes and schools of economics? What happens to all these promises?”
There is a big question being asked such as: What happened to Raisi’s promises of a 5% economic growth, the annual creation of one million jobs and one million new housing units, the reduction of the unemployment rate, and the rapid elimination of absolute poverty?
He previously had said that inflation will be reduced by 50% and then to single digits. Iran’s non-oil exports will increase from $ 35 billion in 2021 to $ 70 billion in 2025, and the country’s total foreign exchange needs will be met from non-oil exports.
There are many indications that the regime is facing a suffocating deadlock. Unlike in previous years now, there are strong beliefs among observers outside Iran that signing a new JCPOA and any concessions by the Western countries will not be to cure the problems the regime is facing.
The experts said in the article: “Our warning to the government is that the situation in the country is very fragile and insisting on the elimination of subsidies in this miserable period will run the people’s patience thin and they will confront the government.”
While acknowledging the economic crisis and shuddering situation of the regime, the state-run Jahan-e Sanat daily, wrote on June 14, “What the government has done as economic surgery, eliminating the preferred currency, adjusting the prices of some commodities, and taking steps to make tough decisions is more a matter of urgency than of a clear and visionary economic policy.”
