Multi-dimensional and fuzzy poverty at the regional level in Iran

This chapter describes economic conditions in Iran, which is essential for understanding the country’s trends in poverty, measured using traditional approaches. The Islamic Republic of Iran, the world’s 18th-largest country measured by population, has the 27th-largest economy based on the gross domestic product (GDP) in current prices and the 18th-largest based on GDP in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP). Over the past half-century, Iran implemented diverse development strategies aimed at poverty reduction. Before 1979, in the pre-revolutionary period, the dominant strategy employed to reduce poverty was growth-oriented development. Great attention has been paid to evolution in the extent of poverty in Iran over this period. However, until recently, to the best of our knowledge, no official information has been available regarding the precise size of the population living in poverty, which has not been measured or tracked systematically by the government.