Bilingual Lecture Series: Hashem Pesaran

Sanctions, Economic Mismanagements, and Reforms of the Iranian Economy

Hashem Pesaran

University of Southern California and Cambridge University

Sunday, February 22, 2026

Royce Hall 314

Alternate Live Stream: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/95091548778

(no registration required for Zoom access)

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This talk will start with an overview of the Iranian economy since the 1979 Revolution and discusses how a combination of sanctions with varying degrees of severity and economic mismanagements have resulted in low economic growth, high unemployment, and rising inflation. There are clear links between sanctions, the need to circumvent their effects, and economic mismanagements. If these sanctions are here to stay, what is the appropriate response both nationally and globally? Should a path of economic resilience through state control or fundamental market reforms be considered? I will explore the pros and cons of alternative strategies of living with sanctions, drawing lessons from the ill-faithed subsidy reform program launched in December 2010 under Ahmadinejad’s Presidency. I shall highlight the differential effects that economic reforms are likely to have across socioeconomic groups in short and medium terms, that further complicate policy responses.

Dr. M. Hashem Pesaran is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics at University of Southern California, Emeritus Professor of Economics at Cambridge University, and a Lifetime Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Previously, he was head of the Economic Research Department of the Central Bank of Iran (1974-76) and the Under-Secretary of the Ministry of Education (1976-78), Iran. He has also been a Professor of Economics and the Director of the Applied Econometrics Program at UCLA (1989-93. Dr. Pesaran is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Econometric Society, and the Journal of Econometrics. He was awarded Honorary Doctorates by the University of Salford in 1993, the University of Goethe, Frankfurt in 2008, the University of Maastricht in 2013 and the University of Economics in Prague in 2016. In September 2013 he was named as Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate in Economics. More recently he was named by Thomson Reuters as one of the World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds for 2014 and 2015. He has served as consultant to the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Dr. Pesaran is the founding editor of the Journal of Applied Econometrics, and a founding Board Member of the International Association for Applied Econometrics. He has published over 250 articles in academic journals and edited volumes, and 19 books and edited volumes.