August 09, 2019
State Broadcasting has told the Iranian public the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has announced that US sanctions on Iran will likely lower economic growth all over the world next year.
However, the IMF said nothing of the kind. The IMF report mentioned possible future US sanctions on China as possibly threatening world economic growth. But it did not cite US sanctions on Iran as having any impact on global growth.
PressTV, the English language arm of state broadcasting told viewers: “The IMF said on Wednesday that Iran sanctions, the China-US trade war and the uncertainty over Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union were the three main factors that had caused the Fund to revise its outlook for global economic growth.”
The IMF did indeed cite Brexit and the China-US trade war, but not Iran. The Iranian state media is often quite inventive when reporting what others say about Iran.
The very first paragraph of the July “World Economic Outlook Update” states in full: “Global growth remains subdued. Since the April World Economic Outlook (WEO) report, the United States further increased tariffs on certain Chinese imports and China retaliated by raising tariffs on a subset of US imports. Additional escalation was averted following the June G20 summit. Global technology supply chains were threatened by the prospect of US sanctions, Brexit-related uncertainty continued, and rising geopolitical tensions roiled energy prices.”
State broadcasting was apparently trying to interpret the phrase “rising geopolitical tensions roiled energy prices” as referring to US sanctions on Iran. It is quite possible the IMF was thinking of US sanctions of Iran as part of “rising geopolitical tensions,” but it did not say so, and the phrase would obviously cover more than just US sanctions.
Furthermore, the IMF did not say “rising geopolitical tensions” prompted it to lower its estimate for global economic growth, only that those tensions “roiled energy prices.” But prices have not soared, so they aren’t curtailing global growth.
In its Middle East section, the IMF said, “Growth in the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan region is expected to be 1.0 percent in 2019, rising to about 3.0 percent in 2020. The forecast [for the region] for 2019 is 0.5 percentage point lower than in the April WEO, largely due to the downward revision to the forecast for Iran (owing to the crippling effect of tighter US sanctions).”
The April IMF forecast was for Iran’s economy to contract by 6.0 percent. But the July report did not contain a statistical table showing its current forecast for how much further Iran’s economy is expected to shrink this year. If the entire region is expected to shrink by half an additional half percentage point, Iran’s contraction would logically be substantially more than that.
