Page 5 - IRANRptMay21

On January 20, Iran’s deputy minister of economic affairs and finance said the country’s foreign debt was currently very insignificant at nearly zero. Utilising foreign debt could be a good opportunity for the government to meet investment needs inside Iran, Mohammad-Ali Dehqan Dehnavi added.
Last October also brought an IMF forecast that Iran's total budget deficit for the current fiscal year (ending on March 19) will be around $58bn. In an April report, the IMF predicted that Iran's foreign exchange reserves would be $85bn in 2020, but around 90% of the reserves are frozen abroad by sanctions.
In mid-January, the head of the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) and the Securities and Exchange Organisation of Iran (SEO) resigned from both of his posts in the wake of a “Black Monday” market crash. Hassan Ghalibaf Asl went as angry protests grew outside the exchange building, trading was halted and the TSE website was pulled.
Investors, many of whom were new entrants to the market in 2019 when officials encouraged new players to look for value in the bourse, have lost billions of dollars in market turmoil that saw the TSE’s main index, the TEDPIX, plummet back down to near a million points, having broken through the million threshold for the first time in May 2020 and smashed through the two-million barrier just three months later.
On the political front, Some 220 Iranian MPs have officially asked Judiciary Chief Justice Ibrahim Raisi to run for president in the June election, ILNA reported on April 25.
Touted as potentially the next supreme leader of the Islamic Republic and known for his hardline views, conservative principlist Raisi, has the second most important role in the country’s power structure. Raisi lost the 2017 presidential election to incumbent and pragmatic moderate politician Hassan Rouhani, by 57% to 38% of the vote.
Looking ahead, the January edition of the World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects report forecasts that GDP growth of 1.5%, from a very low base, is in reach for Iran in 2021. But the situation is fluid. The dropping of the sanctions by the Biden administration would lead to a big revision in prospects—in November, the Institute of International Finance (IIF) trade body said Iran’s economy could expand by as much as 4.4% in 2021 and grow by 6.9% in 2022 and 6% in 2023 if the sanctions were chucked out.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) with its World Economic Outlook figures presented last October (thus a bit behind the curve by now) predicted that Iran’s GDP would contract 5% in 2020 but bounce back by 3.2% in 2021.
Iranian consumer prices in 2019 rose 41% and were on course to grow 30.5% in 2020 and 30% in 2021, the IMF said. However, the official annual inflation rate now stands at 46.2% (compared with less than 10% at the point in May 2018 that Trump quit the nuclear deal) and price growth is very unevenly spread among the various goods and services categories.
Looking at Iran’s current account balance as a percentage of GDP, the Fund gave figures of 1.1%, -0.5% and 0.3% for 2019, 2020 and 2021, respectively.
5 IRAN Country Report May 2021 www.intellinews.com