Page 14 - IRANRptNov21

Iran improves position on Global Innovation Index
Iran’s Gini Index worsens to 0.4006
that they expected the economy to improve somewhat in the next three years. The poll also quizzed Iranians on their views about other countries’ policies towards Iran. Some 67% of respondents said US President Joe Biden’s policies towards Iran were hostile. An unfavourable view of the US was held by 85% of people. More than half of those polled said they had favourable views towards China and Russia, but nearly 90% had unfavourable views towards Saudi Arabia.
The poll also found that among Iranians there is a lack of enthusiasm for the 2015 nuclear deal, or JCPOA. Around 73% of people said their view mostly resembled the following the statement: “The JCPOA experience shows that it is not worthwhile for Iran to make concessions, because Iran cannot have confidence that if it makes a concession world powers will honor their side of an agreement.”
IranPoll also asked Iranians for their views on various Iran-backed paramilitary groups in the Middle East. More than 67% had favourable views of Hezbollah in Lebanon, while more than 63% had favourable views of the Popular Mobilisation Units in Iraq. However, only 48% had favourable views of the Houthi rebels in Yemen, according to the poll.
More than 88% of the respondents gave an unfavourable rating of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Iran has improved its position on the Global Innovation Index (GII). The 2021 edition of the global ranking is dedicated to the development of innovations in the context of the COVID-19 crisis, taking into account how economies have coped with online development during the prolonged difficulties it has caused.
Iran has been ranked in 60th place. That bumped it up a handful of places and classified the country as one of the biggest gainers in its region in the past 12 months.
Iran also ranked 13th among the middle-and upper-middle-income countries and second in the Central and South Asia grouping, ahead of other regional growth markets including Uzbekistan at 86th and Kazakhstan at 79th place. Iran placed ahead of other regional players, including Armenia and Pakistan, in terms of its innovation output performance, but behind countries including Ukraine and Bulgaria.
Iran and Brazil were described by the GII as 2021 outperformers. But the report noted how despite Iran’s improvement, the country remained “stubbornly a long distance behind” in the “geography of global innovation category.”
Iran’s Gini Index worsened to 0.4006 in the last fiscal year (March 2020 to March 2021) from the previous year’s 0.3992, Persian-language daily Shargh has reported, citing the Statistical Centre of Iran (SCI).
The Gini index, or Gini coefficient, was devised by Italian statistician Corrado Gini in 1912. It is usually referred to as the most popular measure of socioeconomic inequality, particularly in terms of income and wealth distribution.
The Gini index ranks income inequality on a scale of zero, which equates to no inequality, to one, which indicates the maximum level of inequality. The closer the number is to one, the more wealth is concentrated in the hands of fewer people and the bigger the income disparity.
Given the way the scale is constructed, a modest-sounding difference in the Gini ratio actually implies a wide difference in inequality.
14 IRAN Country Report November 2021 www.intellinews.com