Page 6 - IRANRptJun22

As for official inflation, the Fund sees 32.3% this year and 27.5% next year, compared to 2021’s 40.1%.
For the current account balance as a percentage of GDP, the IMF determined last year’s 2%% will be followed by 3.5% this year and 2% in 2023.
Official unemployment would remain at around 10% across this year and next, also according to the Fund’s forecasting.
2.0 Politics
2.1 ‘Coma option’ back on agenda as efforts to break
nuclear deal talks deadlock go nowhere
There are indications that Iran and the US are moving towards an acceptance of something towards the “coma option”—or an interim agreement—to break the current deadlock over how to resurrect the 2015 nuclear deal, or JCPOA.
bne IntelliNews reported on the “coma option”, as envisaged by Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, last December.
Under this scenario, Parsi explained in an essay for MSNBC, the agreement between Iran and the major powers “would all but die, but the parties would pretend that it is still alive to avoid the crisis that its official death would spur... Think of how Western powers have pretended that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has been alive for the last decades”.
Parsi, author of “Losing an Enemy — Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy”, reflected on the unattractive options if the nuclear deal diplomacy fails—such as a tightening of sanctions on Tehran in an effort to persuade it not to develop its nuclear knowhow to an unacceptable point in the military sphere, covert operations in an attempt at thwarting the Iranian nuclear development programme, or war—and concluded that the “coma option” might appeal to all sides.
If the JCPOA entered a “coma”, Tehran, added Parsi, “would keep its nuclear leverage while strengthening its economic and political ties with Moscow, Beijing and other governments that would disregard Washington’s sanctions. While clearly not optimal, it is preferable to both a sanctions-less deal and war with the U.S. This would, however, require that Tehran temper its nuclear advances, which it might do since it no longer would press the U.S. to rejoin the agreement.”
One obstacle to sealing an agreement to the re-establishment of the JCPOA is Tehran’s demand that the US delist Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from its blacklist of foreign terrorist organisations (FTOs). As Paul Pillar, a senior fellow at Georgetown University and former executive assistant to the director of US Central Intelligence, has stated: “This move [by former US president Donald Trump to put the IRGC on the list] was a clear misuse of the FTO list. Of the 73 organisations currently on the list, 72 are—as creators of the list intended—non-state groups. The IRGC is the only one that isn’t.”
6 IRAN Country Report June 2022 www.intellinews.com