An Iranian official says major economic
indicators will no longer be announced by the Central Bank but will instead be
reported by the Statistics Center of Iran, RFE/RL's Radio Farda reports.
Adel Azar, head of the Statistics Center, confirmed the change to the
semi-official Fars news agency on August 4.
Slow growth
Paris-based economist Fereidoun Khavand told
Radio Farda that Iran's Central Bank has been responsible for calculating and
announcing the country's inflation rate since it was established in 1960. He
said he thinks the reason for the switch is that the bank is refusing to follow
government orders.
Khavand said that appointing the Statistics Center of Iran as the final
authority to announce the inflation rate indicates that the government is trying
to impose greater control over how the statistics are announced.
Iran's Central Bank has not stated the country's official economic growth rate
for the past two years.
"The bank knows that Iran's economic growth rate was around 0.5 percent in
2008," said Khavand. "But it has been under government pressure not to publish
it as it is in contradiction with [President] Mahmud Ahmadinejad's words in this
regard."
Ahmadinejad recently claimed that the economy is healthy and growing, despite
increasingly restrictive economic sanctions from the United States and European
Union.
Copyright (c) 2010 RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. www.rferl.org
