Can anyone point me to any MMT related analysis of the economy of Iran?
Jim Byrne
I’m looking for information related to the economy of Iran but not finding much - other than mainstream commentaries saying that their economy is a basket case. Has anyone written about Iran from an MMT perspective?
From my limited reading - they have a unique set of circumstances: for example they have their own currency that nobody uses - but they have little foreign debt. I’m looking for something coherent that gives me an overview of where they are at - and something that I can apply an MMT critique to.
Anyone?
Thanks,
Jim
Jay Mills
I haven’t come across any full MMT-specific papers on Iran, and it seems that literature in English is extremely limited. The main challenge is that Iran’s economy operates under sanctions, multiple exchange rates, and constrained access to foreign currency—conditions that make a straightforward MMT application difficult.
That said, there are a few useful starting points:
- Hemmati (2023) – Inflation in Iran: Key Determinants (ShareOK)
- Sadeghi (2022) – The Role of Monetary Policy in Iran’s Economy (Journal of Economic Structures)
- Laudati & Pesaran (2021) – Identifying the Effects of Sanctions on the Iranian Economy (arXiv)
These offer data you could reinterpret through an MMT lens—looking at sectoral balances, fiscal capacity, and inflation constraints under sanctions. So far, no one seems to have done that synthesis explicitly.
On Oct 17, 2025, at 8:11 AM, Jim Byrne <j...@mmt101.org> wrote:
Hi,
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James Keenan
Let's start from some fundamentals. Every state has to mobilize resources in pursuit of the public purpose, however that purpose is defined. Historically, taxation in a currency issued by the state has proven to be a more politically tolerable -- hence, scalable -- way of conducting that resource mobilization than, say, plunder. But if the state issues currency for the purchase of things which that economy is incapable of producing, inflation is likely to result.
From about five minutes of internet searching, I infer that the Iranian state faces severe resource constraints, that it has, like most governments, attempted to get around those constraints via excessive currency issuance, and that inflation is the result. However, since no other state uses that currency and since Iran is apparently unable to borrow foreign currencies, those problems have little impact outside Iran. (Contrast this with, say, Argentina.)
I suspect that an MMT-based analysis of Iran would have to be part of a larger MMT-based study of the question, "What happens when a country opts for or (more likely) is forced into autarky?"
Jay's reading suggestions are better than what I was able to come up with using a search engine.
Ed Lane
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