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2 Ahmadinejad stages a bureaucratic
revolution By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Making good on his campaign promise to
introduce "revolutionary changes" in the
government's management of economic, social and
foreign affairs, Iranian President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad has introduced serious measures that
have yet to be fully implemented but which will in
all likelihood define his era.
Although he
has been in office since October 2005, Ahmadinejad
has now hinted at a "new diplomatic phase at a
different level" within the next four months,
promising that a "new movement" in
Iran's diplomacy is about to start that will
make a significant improvement in the country's
external affairs.
Boasting that Iran has
"a very active" foreign diplomacy, Ahmadinejad has
not publicly elaborated on the details of his bold
new vision or whether it will entail any
organizational restructuring in addition to a "new
approach".
Concerning
the latter, Ahmadinejad's supporters, writing on
the website Rajanews.ir, have provided a couple of
clues. One, Iran is seeking to make ethics the centerpiece
of foreign policy, whereby ethical norms and
considerations will serve as guiding principles in
line with the Islamic constitution that, for
instance, makes it incumbent on the government to
express solidarity with liberation movements and
to pursue Islamic unity.
Connected to this
is a theoretical endeavor to broaden the notion of
"national interest" by telescoping it to the
broader interests of the Muslim world. There is,
after all, a complex relationship between
a specifically national or Iranian set of
interests and the larger pan-Islamist interests that
defies simplistic generalizations.
But
while we await the main contours of the
president's restructuring of Iran's diplomacy, and
how this might impact on relations with the United
States and the international community over
Tehran's nuclear program, the other bureaucratic
ramparts of Ahmadinejad's "revolution" -
particularly with respect to economic
macro-management - are already in full swing.
Indeed, Ahmadinejad has fully embraced the
word "revolution" in describing his planned
revamping of the economic decision-making process
in Iran by his bold decision to dissolve the
Planning Bureau and to merge it with the Center
for Strategic Studies, an arm of the executive
branch.
"The Planning Bureau has a 60-year
history, and no one is happy with it. All the
criticisms are directed at this regime of
planning," Ahmadinejad stated in a recent press
conference, adding that Iran needs an "Islamic and
Iranian" model of planning and cannot solve its
economic problems by following "formulas" founded
by others. Within the next few months, the
government is supposed to unveil its new model -
undoubtedly a litmus test of Ahmadinejad's
presidency, whose promise of "economic justice"
and "economic growth" were key to his elections
victory in 2005.
A change in economic
planning In 1999, this author published an
article, "Iran unveils its proposed third five-year
plan", which included the following: "The
five-year plan - of the few areas in Iran with
unbroken continuity from the pre-revolutionary
[1979] regime - is arguably a relic of the past,
ill-suited to the dynamic process of the Iranian
economy's globalization and privatization."
Eight years later, Ahmadinejad appears to
have reached the same conclusion. The government
will undoubtedly continue to make medium- and
long-term economic plans, but the era of five-year
plans, which the Islamic Republic inherited from
the ancien regime without making any major
institutional alterations until a few weeks ago,
is now closing. At the same time, this casts a
cloud over the country's hitherto triangular
economic decision-making, based on short- (one to
two years), medium- (five years) and long- (20
years) term planning. Many Iranian economists doubt
that the relatively "light" Center for Strategic
Studies can handle the overload of "heavy"
economic decision-making burdens now fallen on its
shoulders.
Nor is it clear that the career
technocrats and bureaucrats of the Planning Bureau
will work well with what until now has been a
relatively minor research arm of the presidency.
The chances are that Ahmadinejad's bold new move
will take place within an inadequate
organizational framework, causing a reversal.
Thus the death knell for the Planning
Bureau may have been sounded prematurely, given
the obsession for economic forecasting and the
sedimented habit of planning in Iran. Too many
variables operate with regard to the "revolution"
in economic management, so the jury is still out.
A balance sheet of five-year economic
planning is desperately needed to assess
objectively the contributions and numerous
deficiencies of this model of economic
macro-management superimposed on the Iranian
economy for so many decades.
Various
economists, including Padma Desai and Manmohan
Agarwal, agree that "the idea of five-year plans
and their designs and implementation owe much to
the Soviet experience". In the book Problems of
the Planned Economy, edited by John Ealwell et
al, the structural tensions between the logic of
statist control of the economy, which recycles
centralized decision-making, and that of
(capitalistic) private economy, which favors
decentralization, are highlighted.
Central
planning reifies the private sector, and it has
been noted by Sovietologist Alec Nove that in the
Soviet and Eastern European experience, "various
forms of indicative planning, reinforced by the
state's own investment plans [eg infrastructure],
became an important contribution to guiding
private investment decisions".
Indeed, the
inadequate pace and scope of privatization in
Iran's state-dominated economy has a lot to do
with the current dissatisfactions with the
"planning fetish" rampant in the government's
bureaucracy. The Third Five Year Plan's aim to
"shrink the size of government" has not
materialized, and its initiative of a new
organization to promote privatization has yielded
few results.
In fact, most of the problems
with the plan were aptly predicted by Parliament's
research center, which faulted its incoherent
industrial, agricultural and commercial policy,
its "lenient" tax
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