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journalists for the past 40 years. State control of news and information is unrelenting and at least 860 journalists and citizen-journalists have been imprisoned or executed since 1979.
It added: “The Islamic regime exercises extensive control over the media landscape and its harassment of independent journalists, citizen-journalists and independent media has not let up. They are constantly subjected to intimidation, arbitrary arrest and long jail sentences imposed by revolutionary courts at the end of unfair trials.
“The media that are still resisting increasingly lack the resources to report freely and independently. As a result, it is the citizen-journalists on social networks who are now at the centre of the battles for freely- reported news and information and for political change in Iran. The regime has extended its fight against media freedom beyond the country’s borders and also targets the international media.”
3.0 Macro Economy
3.1 Macroeconomic overview
IMF raises forecast for 2019 Iranian GDP contraction from 6% to 9.5%
Iran’s economy is expected to contract by as much as 9.5% this year, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said on October 15 in the latest edition of its World Economic Outlook.
Early this year, the Fund was forecasting that the GDP decline would be around 6%, but that was before May’s introduction of the US policy to attempt to drive all of Iran’s crude oil exports off world markets.
Last week, the World Bank predicted a 2019/2020 financial year contraction in Iranian GDP of 8.7%, following on from a 2018/2019 decline of 4.9%.
The Fund added that Iran, along with other emerging market economies, continues to experience “very severe macroeconomic distress”.
A severe devaluation in the Iranian currency since the US re-imposition of heavy sanctions has sent annual inflation soaring. The IMF forecasts it will be 35.7% this year.
The Iranian rial official rate is set at 42,000 rials to the dollar. But by the close of trade on October 15 the free market rate was around 115,000 to the USD, according to foreign exchange website Bonbast.com.
14 IRAN Country Report November 2019 www.intellinews.com
