January 22, 2021
Foreign investment in Iran last year plunged to its lowest level since 2002, underlining the world’s acceptance of US sanctions on the Islamic Republic and willingness to abandon Iran economically.
The annual investment figure, issued by the UN, also contradicts Iran’s claim that foreign investment soared last year. It is quite common for the UN figures to show up the Islamic Republic’s statistics as falsehoods.
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in its latest report says foreign direct investment (FDI) in Iran dropped by 36.5 percent in 2019 compared with the previous year.
FDI was above $5 billion in 2017, but dropped to $2.3 billion the following year and fell further to a $1.5 billion last year as US sanctions took hold.
However, Iranian Economy Minister Farhad Dezhpasand claimed last February, “In the first nine months of 2019, foreign investment in Iran showed a 32 percent increase compared with the same period last year.”
UNCTAD’s statistics show Iran’s share of global FDI in 2019 as less than one-tenth of a percent of the global total, an insignificant figure for a country the size of Iran.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) attracted almost ten times as much, Turkey five times, Saudi Arabia three times, and Iraq and Oman twice as much foreign investment as Iran did.