The government is proposing a bundle of solutions, al-Jibouri continued. These include selling state-owned property, including real estate and vehicles, trying to activate the private sector more and convincing Iraqis to put the money they are keeping under their beds (because they don't trust Iraqi banks) into the bank or into circulation.
“It's a reality we all need to accept,” he says. “And the fact that the government needs to be involved in all these measures is also clear.”
A very difficult road lies ahead, says Layth Shiber, who heads the Energy and Water Development Centre. And it won't be easily traversed because Iraq's current economic problems are the result of years of financial mismanagement, corruption and over dependency on oil revenues.
“Since the 1980s Iraq's economy has been almost solely dependent on sales of oil,” Shiber told NIQASH. “Day by day, Iraq has lost any semblance of being an agricultural producer, as it once was, and for various obvious factors, it hasn’t been able to develop other industries like tourism either. With such high oil prices after 2003, the situation didn't change.”
“Since then successive governments have added more burdens to the budget because they have continued to employ unneeded staff or give out service contracts for unneeded work,” Shiber continues. “Each government has done this to ensure people vote for them. So we depend only on oil for revenue, which is used to pay an overinflated public sector. And no government has been able to provide Iraqis with genuine job opportunities. The Iraqi state is a hollow one financially, with no real value; it is a giant consumer but produces only one thing.”
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