Azerbaijan, Baku, Oct.22 /Trend F.Milad/
Roughly 25-32 percent of Iranians live below the poverty line, Hossein Raghfar a renowned Iranian university lecturer and economist said.
"In the past three years the number of people under absolute poverty line has increased by 2 percent each year," the ILNA News Agency quoted him as saying.
Raghfar added that based on statistics made by non-governmental institutions, 25 to 32 percent of Iranians live in absolute poverty.
Blaming the current government, the lecturer at Al-Zahra University in Tehran reiterated that by its start in 2005 the gap between rich and poor has been steadily widening.
In regard to economic growth in the past years he said that "decision making bodies such as parliament know that it was not higher than three percent."
Central Bank of Iran (CBI), with a considerable delay, announced the official inflation rate of Iranian month of Shahrivar (August 22- September 21) at 24 percent.
It is while CBI usually announces the official rate of inflation in just one week after the end of each month, Frrs News agency reported.
The real rate of inflation in Iran is over 50 percent, an Iranian university lecturer and economist, Mehdi Taghavi, said last week.
Taghavi said the figures obtained on the ground show that the inflation rate is over 50 percent and some unofficial sources bring up even higher numbers.
In its semi-annual World Economic Outlook, the IMF forecast Iran's gross domestic product would shrink 0.9 percent this year after 2 percent growth in 2011.
Its prediction for this year was a downgrade from a forecast of 0.4 percent growth in its last report in April, but the IMF projected GDP would expand next year by 0.8 percent.
The IMF expects inflation to moderate to 21.8 percent in 2013 from 25.2 percent in 2012; many private economists, however, think inflation is well over 30 percent.
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