Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, a research associate with the Dubai Initiative, discusses the impact of sanctions on Iran, youth unemployment and "waithood" in the Middle East, and the work of the Dubai Initiative with communications intern Meredith Blake.

On a chilly day in February, while thousands of Iranians swarmed Tehran’s Eghelab Avenue in support of Iran’s Green Movement, a small but noisy crowd gathered just a few blocks north with a different motive. This crowd was protesting their missing application for a program that has captured the imagination of millions of ordinary Iranians for the last two months, cash deposits in their bank accounts.

Djavad Salehi-Isfahani is an associate with the Belfer Center's Dubai Initiative and a professor of economics at Virginia Tech. He researches impact on sanctions on Iran as well as the impact of youth unemployment on the Middle East.

Prospects for talks between the P5+1 and Iran are poor. With a swing to the right in mid-term U.S. Congressional elections, Iran is steadied for a tussle it believes the U.S. and Israel cannot win.

This paper will review the evidence on youth transitions in Iran, using recent survey data to show how the economic crisis since 2008 has affected youth transitions to employment and to marriage.

This paper argues that prolonged major economic disruptions in Iran, caused by the Western sanctions or military action, risk alienating Iran's youth, with serious long-term consequences for the United States and its allies in the region.

At long last and after decades of talking about doing something about the subsidies, there is a bill before Iran's majlis to target (but not remove) subsidies.  I could not locate the bill itself but my impression is that it only addresses energy subsidies and not other subsidies such as food and medicine.  So far only 5 of the bill's 14 articles have been passed, but the government already has the mandate to raise prices on energy products over the next five years

US and Iranian representatives meet this week at a time when trust between the two countries is at a low ebb following the revelation last week of a previously undisclosed Iranian nuclear facility under construction and the test firing of Iran's long-range missiles on September 28. Meanwhile, the Obama administration's policy of engagement with Iran has emerged as little more than the old policy of "carrots and sticks."

This paper appears in the Winter 2017 issue of Revue Internationale des Études du Développement and examines the record of the Islamic Republic of Iran in reducing poverty and income inequality, important populist promises of the 1979 Revolution. Using data from 32 years of income and expenditure surveys, I describe the trends in poverty and income inequality during the past three decades, and offer explanations of their major changes. These trends reveal two important facts about the post-Revolution record in improving poverty and income inequality. While there has been significant progress in reducing poverty, little progress is observed in improving income inequality. Poverty reduction has followed a substantial redirection of public investment toward poorer areas and cash assistance. The two periods of improvement in income inequality correspond to a decline in oil revenues and a loss of income at the top (the 1980s), and to a large cash assistance program starting in 2011.