Regional planning in Iran: a survey of problems and policies.

of 10 to 1.1 Measured in terms of the Williamson factor, the per capita GRP inequality indicator was 0.9226 for Iran as compared to 0.1088 for the United Kingdom, 0.3078 for the Republic of Korea, 0.6775 for Thailand, and 1.6201 for Brazil.2 Extreme regional inequality in Iran and the systematic widening of the gap among the regions (despite substantial gains by the poorer regions since the 1960s) has also been noted or documented by a number of other studies.3 The purpose of this paper is not to argue for the existence or acuteness of regional inequality in Iran. These issues are, indeed, hardly disputed, although critical inquiry about them remains very inmportant. Instead, I shall attempt to uncover the root causes of such extreme inequality by focusing on Iran's five development plans from 1949 to 1978. Specifically, the systematic widening of the gap among the Iranian regions and the resultant extreme inequality between the least and the most developed regions are the consequences of two developments: (1) the centralist/ sectoralist nature of Iranian political/administrative and socioeconomic structures that evolved with the advent of capitalism since the midnineteenth century but were institutionalized only from the 1920s on; and (2) planning for national economic growth on a sectoral-efficiency or natural-resource basis, and the accompanying capital-oriented policy promoted by institutionalized planning since 1949. Further stimulated by increasing oil revenues, the first of these developments annihilated regional autonomy, while the second led to a concentrated pattern of aocumulation