Will economic drivers be the priority of the 7th plan?

According to IRNA, the 7th development plan will be the top document of all laws of the country in the next 5 years. In this article, we have examined the approach of the development week program.

The problem-oriented nature of the upstream development document highlights the need to pay attention to the issue and an important challenge, and that is the formulation of this seventh plan based on the background of sanctions and existing conditions, as well as predicting the continuation of this process or even its intensification; An issue that has recently been emphasized in the speeches of the Speaker of the Islamic Council, the Chairman of the Program and Budget Committee of the Parliament, as well as the head of the Research Center of the Islamic Council and has become one of the principles of this program.

Compilation of the development plan with a view to sanctions, but from the perspective of programming and budgeting experts, has another specific meaning, and that is paying attention to the domestic industry, productive economy and economic drivers; A pioneering example in this field may be the home appliances industry, where even before the sanctions began, two large South Korean companies that had a large share of the Iranian market, left this market and stopped serving Iranian customers.

In such a situation, if the domestic industry could not compensate for this sudden departure, there would definitely be additional pressure on the Iranian economy, the market situation, as well as the Iranian society and family. This example highlights to some extent the importance of sanctions-based planning, which will be further dissected in an upcoming report.

* Why pay attention to sanctions in developing the 7th plan; Realization of only 30% of the sixth plan

Considering the background mentioned at the beginning of this report, let’s refer to the new words of the speaker of the parliament; “Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf” said on Monday, October 25 this year, that “we must formulate the 7th development plan based on the existing sanctions.”

According to the report of the official media of the parliament, Qalibaf made these words in the meeting of the Coordination Council of the Islamic Council, which was held in the presence of the heads of specialized commissions of the parliament and Mehrdad Bazarparesh, the head of the country’s Audit Bureau, and explained: “Looking at the total of 6 The development plan has passed, it shows that we are in a bad situation in terms of macroeconomic growth, because an average of 30% of the sixth plan has been implemented, while if we did nothing, this 30% would have happened by itself. “Maybe if we didn’t interfere at times, better things would have happened.”

But why did a program with so much time, budget and attention to the existing conditions suffer such a fate? The Speaker of the Parliament said in this regard: “I believe that our weakness in this sector is not lack of knowledge and literacy in programming or not having enough capital to implement it, but rather we do not have the necessary heart and thought to implement it, because we are morally and organizationally bound to implement the law. We don’t and unfortunately this issue has become our management culture. We must formulate the plan based on the facts and existing sanctions. In fact, I believe that it is not necessary to learn planning from Westerners, but it is enough to be committed to what we know and act. Also, the supervisory bodies and commissions should try to reduce the sentences to a minimum first, and then if we issue a sentence, we should specify the person responsible for it, so that the task of implementing that sentence and the place of its follow-up and monitoring are clear.

It seems that the most important axis of this meeting and the most significant issue raised in this meeting should be found in these last sentences: developing a program based on the reality and existing sanctions. The importance of this issue becomes more prominent when we know that almost all economic experts and experts in the field of budget writing emphasize this issue and have mentioned it in their speeches in the past few months.

* The seventh program; Getting help from sanctions to achieve self-sufficiency

Similar to the recent words of the speaker of the parliament, it can be seen in the explanations of Hamidreza Hajibabaei, the head of the program and budget commission of the Islamic Council, and that is the necessity of paying attention to the economic drivers and entrepreneurial and foundational projects of the 7th plan.

At the end of September this year, Hajibabaei said about the priorities of the 7th plan: “The 7th plan should be able to grow our economic indicators and strengthen the spirit of resistance of the country’s economy despite the unprecedented sanctions that have been imposed. We should also use sanctions in the seventh plan to achieve self-sufficiency in various cases.”

In these months, he repeatedly emphasized the importance of paying attention to the issue of sanctions in the compilation of this upstream document, one of which is in his recent interview with Fars News Agency: “We should not make the country indebted due to the sanctions situation, but we should take into account the needs of domestic resources. Let’s try to deliver the 7th plan in such a way that the country can make the country’s economy dynamic by using domestic resources. Making the country knowledge-based in all upstream and downstream parts, employment and transferring the quality of the country’s human resources with regard to the knowledge-based production are among the important things that should be taken into account in the seventh plan and require the necessary cooperation between the government and the parliament.

These words of the Chairman of the Program and Budget Commission of the Islamic Council, which plays an important role in the finalization of the 7th Plan, are, in other words, an emphasis on the issue that is now the focus of many experts and experts in the field of economy and development. He emphasizes on employment, productive economy and entrepreneurship, that all these things will be obtained from the results of paying attention to big entrepreneurial projects and supporting the economic drivers of the country.

* Development Bank is on the way?

In the past years, entrepreneurs and owners of large private industries of the country emphasized the lack of a mechanism to finance large entrepreneurial projects and spoke of the necessity of finding a solution in this field; It seems that in the last one or two years, these complaints and criticisms have been heard to some extent, and now various solutions are being investigated and implemented. One of these cases is the recent words of the Minister of Economy, who proposed the creation of a “Development Bank” as a proposal.

But the story goes back to the authorization of the National Development Fund to the board of directors of this fund for direct investment in Pishran projects, which is supposed to be included in the 7th development plan to strengthen the financing of development based on the experiences and the government’s transformation document.

“Syed Ehsan Khandoozi” had previously said that “the institutional vacuum in the issue of development financing is very serious in the sense of financing large-scale projects, and by the way, this institutionalization is one of the driving engines of investment in the country and the solutions to get out of the low investment situation.” In my opinion, we should reach a conclusion regarding the integration of the idea of ​​establishing the Development Bank with the role played by the National Development Fund and be able to take advantage of the same capacity in the form of a new statute and a new special task, and I think the seventh plan is a good opportunity to reach an agreement. between the government and the parliament to establish this institution under the seventh development plan.”

These words of the Minister of Economy are while in the first edition of the government transformation document, one of the axes raised regarding institution building to guide development credits is defined as follows: redefining the role of existing specialized banks in financing development and establishing a development bank in order to guide credit to projects the development of the country and defining the relationship of this bank with the national development fund and the government’s construction budget.

The new words of the Minister of Economy, several paragraphs in the government transformation document, the headings set for the 7th plan, the emphasis of the speaker of parliament and other senior officials on the attention to the productive economy and economic drivers in the 7th plan, and dozens of studies and research articles all emphasize and agree on one issue. And that is supporting economic drivers as an important and necessary solution; In simpler words, taking into account the sanctions, the records of the previous six development programs, as well as the experience of developed countries, drafting the seventh program with an eye on the productive economy and supporting economic drivers and large entrepreneurial projects is not just one of the solutions, but a highway and a necessity.