The proposal, reported Thursday by the IRGC-linked daily Javan, would put Mayor Alireza Zakani in charge of supplying essential goods to households in the capital.<\/p>\n
Zakani claims the plan, approved by President Masoud Pezeshkian, could reduce prices by up to 40 percent. Residents quoted by Javan said municipal-run markets already sell cheaper goods than elsewhere in the city.<\/p>\n
But even at face value, the initiative seems to be yet another reactive measure in a system afflicted by deep structural problems. The question is less whether this plan can work and more why such plans keep reappearing.<\/p>\n
Moderate outlet Fararu this week laid out the structural flaws driving Iran\u2019s crisis: contradictory decision-making by overlapping institutions, a budget tied to unstable oil revenues, and an absence of dependable data that leaves officials governing by instinct rather than information.<\/p>\n
Economic policy, the outlet said, is shaped by ministries, the Central Bank, the Planning and Budget Organization, and an array of parallel bodies that often work at cross-purposes.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost economic decisions in Iran are made overnight,\u201d it wrote, warning that real change requires slow, coordinated reform across government\u2014something the Islamic Republic has resisted for decades.<\/p>\n
\u2018Bipolar economy\u2019<\/p>\n
The centrist daily Sazandegi pointed to another symptom of this dysfunction: chaotic decision-making that thrives in the grey zones created by sanctions.<\/p>\n
The paper highlighted the clash between hardline MP Amir Hossein Sabeti and Babak Zanjani\u2014the \u2018sanctions-fixer\u2019 once sentenced to death but pardoned and now tapped again to recover Iran\u2019s oil revenues.<\/p>\n
\u201cIran\u2019s economy exists in a bipolar state,\u201d Sazandegi wrote, \u201ccaught between a revolutionary pursuit of social justice that resists globalization and a rentier capitalism that thrives on sanctions.\u201d<\/p>\n
The public spat between two privileged insiders, Sazandegi argued, is evidence of an economy pulled between ideological theatrics and rent-seeking networks\u2014a system that\u2019s neither competitive nor transparent.<\/p>\n
Bleak outlook<\/p>\n
Despite their scathing critiques, both outlets chose to not mention the elephant in the room\u2014as is almost always the case in Iran: a foreign policy that has produced decades of isolation and tightening sanctions.<\/p>\n
With the return of UN sanctions in late September\u2014and Tehran\u2019s continued combative stance\u2014the situation is likely to deteriorate further before any improvement is possible.<\/p>\n
Seen through that lens, Zakani\u2019s food-distribution proposal is less a solution than another reflex: an attempt to patch symptoms without addressing the machinery underneath.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The proposal, reported Thursday by the IRGC-linked daily Javan, would put Mayor Alireza Zakani in charge of supplying…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":252484,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-252483","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/252484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}