A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran by Kevan Harris

Author:Kevan Harris [Harris, Kevan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, Middle East, Iran
ISBN: 9780520280816
Google: QT63DgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2017-08-08T00:49:03.872000+00:00

The Islamic [government], throughout its postrevolutionary evolution, has incorporated developmentalist and culturalist postures vis-à-vis women. These two postures have by no means been in opposition to each other all the time. For instance, the strict application of the Islamic dress code has been used as a mechanism to break cultural barriers against women’s presence in the public domain—a license, so to speak, [that] women have so far used very effectively to enter the public space as wage earners or in any other capacity. At the same time, the requirements of a development-oriented liberalisation policy invariably come into conflict with interests that justifiably worry about cultural liberalisation as an intended consequence of economic liberalisation.

After the war, the encouragement of early retirement occurred once again. This time, instead of a gender-oriented policy, it emerged from the government’s belief that shrinking public-employment rolls was a requirement of economic growth. Public-sector workers hired during the war years were told to take a buyout.50 One consequence was that the government kept the benefits package of social-insurance funds generous during the 1990s to induce retirement.51

As long as younger workers were entering the formal labor force, as initially occurred because of Iran’s 1980s war–baby boom, the state could afford these benefits through new SSO enrollments. Yet, once family size began to rapidly decline over the 1990s, SSO officials realized that a cost inflection point was looming on the horizon where revenues would be surpassed by expenditures to beneficiaries. The United Nations predicts that Iran’s population size will level off by 2025 and then begin to decline. In 2011, only 7.6 percent of the country’s population (some 75 million) was over 60 years of age. By 2050, this is estimated to jump to 33.1 percent of a population of an expected 85 million—only 5 million higher than the population size in 2015. The Social Security Organization will be the key organization responsible for maintaining the retirement and health insurance for this elderly cohort.

As a result, the SSO gradually shifted to a riskier strategy through its in-house investment company, SHASTA. As one of the largest management conglomerates in Iran, SHASTA has mirrored global trends in pension-fund privatization and speculation, which Robin Blackburn has labeled gray capitalism. The process is gray “not only because it refers to provision for the old, but also because the property rights of the policyholders are weak and unclear.”52 Iran may seem an unlikely place for the novel financial techniques of a globalized era, but gray capitalism has planted firm roots in the Islamic Republic as a result of the unintended consequences of its developmental push. Until 1976, the SSO simply held workers’ pension contributions in fixed long-term deposits. SHASTA was created in 1986, after the revolution, to manage a portion of these investments. In 1989, around 80 percent of SSO’s investment portfolio was still held in the form of risk-free bank deposits. Yet by 2000, this share had decreased to 10 percent, while 71 percent of the SSO’s total portfolio was composed of direct and indirect investments in riskier assets.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.