Azerbaijan, Baku, May.26 / Trend F.Karimov/
The governor of the Iranian Central Bank Mahmoud Bahmani said that nothing more can be done to curb inflation, the Tasnim News Agency reported.
"The [inflation] rate is very high. But, what can we do? We did our best to reduce the inflation, but that was all we could do," he said.
Last year, the central bank paid 1,956 billion rials in financial facilities, 31.7 percent of which was paid to the production and industry sector, he noted.
Previously, Bahmani said that the country hopes to curb inflation through taking three financial policies.
Through selling bonds and gold coins, as well as through reducing liquidity, we hope to curb inflation, Mehr quoted Bahmani as saying.
Bahmani also said that gold has been purchased and reserved sufficiently for 15 years, and that there is no problem in this regard.
Some $3 billion has been injected to the Forex Center during the past month and $2 billion has been allocated to import staple foods, he noted.
The Tehran Forex center was officially inaugurated on September 24, 2012. It allows importers of goods to buy dollars at a rate 2 percent cheaper than the street rate at any given time.
Meanwhile, the government maintains an official reference rate of 12,260 rials to the dollar.
The Iranian government plans to use revenues from petrochemical sales and 14.5 percent of its oil revenues to provide dollars for the center, central bank governor Mahmoud Bahmani said in September 2012.
Iran's inflation rate reached 38.7 percent in the first month of the current Iranian calendar year (March 21-April 20), the Mehr News agency reported, citing the Iranian Statistics Center.
Inflation in Iran amounted to 25.4 percent on the average during the past Iranian calendar year.
The inflation rate increased from 21.8 percent in the first calendar month of Farvardin to 31.5 percent in the final month of Esfand, the report said. Growth in liquidity and foreign currency exchange rates were probably the main causes of inflation rise.
In December 2012, IRNA quoted Finance and Economic Affairs Minister Shamseddin Hosseini as saying that the Iranian administration has special plans to curb a probable surge in inflation during the final months of the current Iranian calendar year, ending on March 20, 2013.
As recent rises in prices on goods are in close relation with rises in foreign currency prices, so we should rein in foreign currency shocks, he added.
The International Monetary Fund said on April 16 that Iran's economy contracted by 1.9% in 2012 and is expected to shrink by 1.3% this year as it reels from the impact of Western sanctions.
The economy of the Islamic republic is, however, forecast to grow next year by 1.1%, the IMF said in its annual World Economic Outlook.