January 17, 2025
The rate of inflation has been declining in recent months, prompting the regime to tout its great success, although the rate remains one of the highest in the world. By both measures of inflation used by the Statistical Center of Iran (SCI), the annual rate of inflation is now down in the low 30s, far from the high 40s that had long prevailed and the occasional 50+ in some months as recently as 2022.
The SCI said the annual rate of inflation calculated as the average of the 12 months ending at the end of the Persian month of Azar on December 20 came to 32.5 percent while the rate calculated as the point-to-point change from December 2023 to December 2024 was 31.4 percent.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) website shows that of more than 200 jurisdictions where it tracks inflation, only eight countries had a higher inflation rate than Iran, even after it fell into the low 30s. Those higher jurisdictions were Zimbabwe at 635 percent, Argentina at 230 percent, Sudan at 200 percent, South Sudan at 121 percent, Turkiye at 61 percent, Venezuela at 60 percent, Sierra Leone at 37 percent and Egypt at 33 percent.
The IMF figures show only 21 jurisdictions, or about 10 percent of what it measures, have inflation rates above 10 percent. In Iran, the annual inflation rate topped 50 percent for several months in 2022. The current rate is the lowest since July 2020. Good periods have been rare for decades. The best the Islamic Republic did recently was in 2010 and again in 2016- 17 when the rate fell below 10 percent over several months.