Posts tagged : "Economy"

Asia Times - Kourosh Ziabari: Iranians are buying real estate in Turkey in hope of acquiring citizenship and leaving behind the bitter realities of life in Iran’s failing state and economy. Foreign nationals who purchase Turkish houses, apartments, offices, shops or land worth at least US$250,000 can obtain Turkish citizenship, according to the Turkish government’s citizenship by property investment scheme. The previous threshold was $1 million but Ankara slashed the minimum purchase in 2018 amid an economic crisis and eyeing increased investment by well-to-do Persian Gulf citizens as well as would-be Iranian immigrants. Immigration from Iran to Turkey has steady risen in recent years, with the first wave starting in 2009...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iranians, suffering a raging pandemic as their mismanaged and failed state is crushed by US economic sanctions, are taking their own lives in increasing numbers. Even the young are resorting to suicide to avoid the harsh realities of a life of suffering and austerity. Health Ministry data shows suicide attempts rose 23% in the first three months of the Iranian calendar starting March 20, 2020, compared with the same period the year before. Local media, citing sociology researchers, revealed a 60% spike in suicide among Iranians from 2015 to 2019. Hossein Assadbeigi, head of the office of socially vulnerable people at the State Welfare Organization of Iran, said that 5,143 people, including...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: As nations worldwide jockey to secure access to the newly authorized Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19  vaccine, Iranian authorities continue to issue contradictory statements about how and whether inoculations will be made available in the country. Iran, the Middle East’s hardest pandemic-hit country, is by all accounts lagging in the global race to obtain the shots, sparking new criticism of President Hassan Rouhani’s perceived as lacking pandemic response. Iran’s Covid-19 death toll surpassed 53,000 on Thursday. Iran is one of 94 countries that have inked commitment agreements with the COVAX facility co-led by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI);...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Forty-two years ago, Iran was a crucial party to the alliance of Western powers, crowned by US president Jimmy Carter as “an island of stability in one of the most troubled areas of the world.” Today, the same country, having undergone a political metamorphosis, is the bête noire of that alliance, aggregated by George W Bush into an “Axis of Evil,” blamed as culpable for a catalogue of challenges facing humanity. As a comeuppance for its post-1979 policies and actions seen by the world as destructive and malign, Iran has been disciplined with unsparing economic sanctions. The United States, the foremost enforcer of these punitive measures, oversees sanctions regimes targeting nearly 30...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: As the world is engrossed in the news around the Covid-19 crisis and the epoch-making US presidential contest, the tragic deaths of four Kurdish Iranian migrants in the English Channel off the north coast of France has filled many with sorrow, throwing the plight of Iranian refugees and asylum-seekers into the spotlight. Rasoul Iran-Nejad and Shiva Mohammad Panahi, both 35, and their children Anita and Armin, aged nine and six, were crossing from France to the UK on October 27 when their boat capsized. They died, and the couple’s 15-month-old son Artin is missing. British media reported that the family had paid migrant smugglers a huge sum to take them to the UK shores by boat. They sold all of...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iran was overtaken with merriment and relief when the long-awaited nuclear deal was inked in July 2015 by the Islamic Republic and six world powers, spelling a happy ending to a diplomatic impasse that had been an unnerving fixture of media headlines and an unvarying talking point of world leaders for nearly two decades. Iran was extricated from the bludgeoning sanctions that had maimed its economy and turned it into a hermit kingdom, and the international community obtained robust assurances that Tehran’s nuclear program would not deviate toward weaponization. A genuine diplomatic breakthrough was clinched, and then-US president Barack Obama lauded it as “the strongest non-proliferation agreement...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iran’s economy has never been more vulnerable and fragile. Last month, President Hassan Rouhani complained that the United States has been waging an “economic warfare” against Iran by slapping sanctions on the country’s energy, finance, banking, industrial and shipping sectors. In a bid to isolate Iran further, amputate the remaining ties between its financial institutions and the global banking system and prohibit the access of the government in Tehran to much-needed hard currency, the United States on Thursday introduced a new set of sweeping sanctions targeting 18 Iranian banks that were not previously targeted with punitive measures. Cyrus Bina is a distinguished research professor of...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: As the United States seeks to ramp up economic pressure on Iran via renewed economic sanctions, the nation’s already slipping currency, the rial, has gone into a virtual free fall. New reports suggest that Iran’s rial has lost at least 49% of its value so far in 2020, a devastating collapse of the local unit. As such, the rial is now effectively one of the most worthless currencies in the world, inferior even to the Iraqi dinar and Pakistani rupee. As of September 24, the rial traded on unofficial markets at 277,900 to the US greenback while the official rate was 42,276. In July, the government approved plans to remove zeroes from the currency to ease making transactions, something locals have...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Awqaf, Iran’s powerful religious endowments agency, answerable only to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and operating a portfolio generating nearly one-quarter billion US dollars annually, is facing intense scrutiny this week following reports it has seized a slice of the iconic Mount Damavand. “Investigations reveal that the Awqaf has secured an endowment deed for one out of 11 registered parcels of Mount Damavand, from the foothills to the summit,” reported Hamshahri, one of Iran’s most reputable national newspapers. The deed for the tranche of the nation’s most famous mountain was secured through a ruling by the Supreme Court, and without input from the national Forests, Range and Watershed...

Kourosh Ziabari - The New Arab: Protests over the continued scarcity of water in the southwestern Iranian province of Khuzestan have once again thrown into relief the economic and social woes of a region credited with being the beating heart of Iran's petroleum industry. The region routinely provides a boost to the national economy, while it simultaneously stagnates in poverty and underdevelopment. Gheyzanieh province boasts a population of 25,000 and is located 40 kilometres east of Ahvaz, the capital of Khuzestan Province. It hosts the largest petroleum companies of Iran, and produces 2 million barrels of crude oil per day. The district sits on upwards of 600 oil wells. The majority of Gheyzanieh residents are farmers or have...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: As Iranians took to the streets in cities and towns across the country last month in response to a massive fuel hike tax, the northern province of Guilan stood out as an exception. Home to more than 2.5 million people, and bordering Russia from its perch on the Caspian Sea, Guilian’s muted reaction to the protest movement offers a window into the economic inequalities in the Islamic Republic today, as well as the resignation felt by many Iranians under sanctions. Figures by the Statistical Center of Iran indicate Guilan is the fifth richest province of Iran, outpacing 26 provinces in terms of household net worth thanks to its agricultural resources. According to the Rice Research Institute of...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: As the Iranian economy crumbles under US sanctions, scammers are exploiting the popularity of state-backed game shows to swindle the middle class. For Iman Fard, a 30-year-old computer engineer in the northern Caspian coastal city of Rasht, it all started with a phone call from an unknown number. “They called me around 9 PM, saying that they represented a radio station in Tehran. They said I was one of 14 people who were chosen by the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology of Iran to receive a cash prize of 50 million rials ($455) for my reasonable and responsible use of my cell phone,” he told Asia Times. “They said the ministry wanted to award me because I don’t use my cell...