Iran's Central Bank claims 22% inflation for 2019

In an unprecedented move, the Central Bank of Iran has published its annual inflation forecast, saying that the inflation rate this year will be 22 percent.

The Central Bank of Iran previously only published its estimate of the inflation rate for the previous month and never made predictions about the future.

With increasing criticism of the discrepancy between the Statistics Center's reports and the Central Bank's estimates, this institution stopped publishing monthly inflation reports in 2018.

The Central Bank said in a report: "The inflation rate will continue its downward trend this year. Accordingly, the Central Bank sets its inflation rate target at 22 percent with a positive and negative range of 2 percentage points."

This is while, according to the International Monetary Fund, Iran's inflation rate is expected to be 34.2 percent this year. Last year's inflation rate was 41.1 percent.

The Central Bank claims to have taken measures that "laid the groundwork for changing the direction of the economy since the spring of 2019, and the result was evident before the outbreak of the coronavirus in the form of improvements in macroeconomic indicators such as the inflation rate, growth in the non-oil sector of the economy, the production index of large industrial plants, and other such things."

The claim of economic growth in the non-oil sector comes while, according to the International Monetary Fund, Iran's non-oil economic growth rate last year was minus 1.2 percent and will be minus six percent this year.

Source: Radio Farda