By Cyrus Safdari | Iran Affairs | February 14, 2014
The NY Times is spinning the recent IMF report on Iran in order to portray the sanctions on Iran has having forced Iran to negotiations, one aspect of a recent “frame” that is being built around the nuclear talks by the US mainstream media which seeks to portray the Iranians as the intransigent party seeking nukes, never mind that it was the US that had blocked talks and killed off compromises even under Obama
However, lets remember the reaction to the previous IMF report, which had also said that while Iran’s economy would dip due to sanctions, it would return to growth. This report was issued before the talks were even imagined. Those reports caused such an uproar that the regular Iran bashers, who wanted to see a report that confirmed the effectiveness of sanctions, started casting doubt on the IMF. But in effect, there is no real difference between the previous IMF report and this one except that this one has gone into more detail, as was promised in the previous IMF report.
Thus, the NY Time’s spin on the IMF report as proof of the effectiveness of sanctions, fails.
In fact, if you compare Iran’s economic growth to that of the US by %GDP growth, you’d be surprised to see that Iran actually has done better on a pretty regular basis (even if you ignore 2009)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-03/imf-says-iran-s-economy-set-to-grow-on-successful-subsidy-plan.html
http://iranprimer.usip.org/blog/2011/jun/14/imf-assesses-iran%E2%80%99s-economy
http://www.brandeis.edu/crown/publications/meb/MEB57.pdf