Governanca Economica Global (ou falta de) - Jeffry Frieden

Um artigo de 2009, mas ainda inteiramente válido, sobre a crise econômica global e as dificuldades que têm os governos nacionais em cooperar de modo racional com os demais. O que também explica a incapacidade do G20 financeiro de realizar efetivamente a coordenação de políticas econômicas. Cada um toma medidas de estrito escopo doméstico, sem pensar nos demais.
Como aliás está fazendo o governo brasileiro agora mesmo, ao recorrer ao protecionismo para tentar manter empregos domésticos durante a crise atual.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Avoiding the worst: International economic cooperation and domestic politics

Jeffry A. Frieden, 2 February 2009

If the crisis turns into a new Great Depression, it will most likely be due to a breakdown of cooperation among the major economies. But sustaining international cooperation requires domestic support; ignoring the demands of poor and middle-class citizens for relief will inflame more extreme anti-globalisation views, making international cooperation much more difficult.

Share on bloggerShare on facebookShare on twitterShare on emailMore Sharing Services1

A

A

If the current crisis turns into a disaster on the order of the Great Depression, it will most likely be due to a breakdown of cooperation among the major economies. The history of the modern world economy – and especially of its collapse in the 1930s – makes clear that the principal powers have to work together if they are to maintain an integrated international economic order.

International cooperation needs domestic support for openness

Yet governments are only able to make the sacrifices necessary to sustain international cooperation if they can rely, in turn, on domestic political support for an open world economy. National publics unconvinced of the value of international integration will not back policies – often costly and difficult policies – to maintain it. This can lead – again, as in the 1930s – to a perverse process in which global economic failure undermines support for economic openness, which leads governments to pursue uncooperative policies, which further weakens the global economy.

On both dimensions, international and domestic, we are in trouble. So far, despite high-sounding internationalist rhetoric, governments have responded to the crisis with policies that take little account of their impact on other nations. And the crisis has dramatically reduced domestic public support for globalisation, and for national policies to sustain it.

Why reasonable governments do unreasonable things

On the international dimension, the threat is not so much of explicit protectionism but rather of nationally specific policies that impose costs on others, directly or indirectly.

These beggar-thy-neighbour policies are not normally the result of some inexplicable bloody-mindedness on the part of venal governments, or of purposeful antagonism toward rivals. They are, instead, desperate attempts to defend national economies from gathering storms. But they impose negative externalities on other countries, and in so doing can provoke hostile reactions that can drag all parties concerned into bitter conflict.

Not out of arrogant nationalism but out of domestic desperation

Domestic constituents demand action, and governments have to respond, even at the expense of international cooperation. This can easily lead down a path toward conflict. Financial intervention to restore liquidity or solvency to the banking system can come at the expense of financial partners, sucking funds out of neighbours.

The early-October Irish blanket deposit guarantee, implemented with the perfectly understandable goal of avoiding a bank panic in a small and vulnerable economy, nearly induced a run on British banks as British depositors rushed to transfer funds from British to Irish banks. The current American financial bailout is drawing capital from the rest of the world – including from emerging markets that urgently need it – not out of arrogant nationalism but out of domestic desperation. And the buy-American provisions of the current stimulus package demonstrate the ease with which well-intentioned policies can turn into uncooperative predation.

The range of policies of this type – sincere national initiatives with counter-productive international implications – is virtually endless.

Negative externalities galore

Support for troubled national firms can turn into anti-competitive subsidies to national champions. Currency depreciation, a common recommendation for difficult times, can put competitive pressure on trading partners, leading to round after round of “competitive devaluations.”  Debt-averse governments can limit the size of their fiscal stimulus, thereby free riding on the deficit spending of neighbours. Countries with intolerable foreign debt burdens can seek debt write-downs that further cripple creditor-country financial markets. And all of these can interact to create powerful protectionist pressures. One country’s fiscal stimulus can “leak” into a neighbour, draw in a surge of imports from the neighbour, and provoke a bitter protectionist backlash.

Even with the best of intentions, governments can act in ways that drive wedges among countries, block cooperative responses to the crisis, and ultimately make everyone worse off. And despite today’s flowery rhetoric, there is little evidence that national policymakers are willing or able to take into account the international implications of their actions.

If this pattern continues, it will be a major obstacle to a rapid recovery.

Will anyone speak for the rest of the world? 

National governments rarely consider global consequences, because their constituents are domestic and national publics are very sceptical about the contemporary world economy.

Even before the crisis hit, there had been real erosion in popular support for globalisation. Economic integration has come to be associated with job losses, competitive pressures, and a worsening of income distribution in developed and developing countries alike. Nearly universally, the lower registers of the income distribution are most dubious about the benefits of international economic integration, and these doubts are particularly widespread in more unequal societies.

The crisis has heightened suspicion of a world economy that appears to be the source of much of our current predicament. There is increasing resentment that the expansion of the past ten years primarily helped the wealthy, while the poor and middle classes are being asked to sacrifice to deal with the hangover of the binge. This is coupled with similar resentment that governments appear to privilege the concerns of international banks and corporations. There is an advancing popular view that insulation will help reinforce national attempts to deal with the crisis.

National publics will increasingly resist making national sacrifices in order to honour international economic obligations. Meanwhile, concentrated interests who support globalisation – such as the international financial and corporate sectors – have been undermined by international economic weakness. Broad popular sentiment is increasingly widespread and powerful that national responses to the crisis must take priority over international obligations.

Attention must be paid: Crisis’s impact on income distribution

The impact of the crisis on income distribution cannot be ignored, for it will determine much of the politics of government responses to the crisis. Ignoring the demands of poor and middle-class citizens for relief will inflame more extreme anti-globalisation views, making international cooperation that much more difficult.

These two dimensions, the international and the domestic, are closely interrelated. The less domestic support there is for globalisation, the harder it will be for national governments to reach cooperative agreements with partners. The less international cooperation there is, the greater the likelihood of a deterioration in the global economy. As in the 1930s, beggar-thy-neighbour policies, distributional conflicts, and international economic stagnation could feed on each other in a downward dance.

Into the maelstrom? 

Governments have to act consciously to counteract this dismal possibility.

·     At the domestic level, governments need to work out an equitable and politically sustainable allocation of austerity across the population.

This means ensuring that those sectors of society hit hardest by the crisis are not also the ones asked to bear the stiffest sacrifices. Societies with existing social safety nets will have to expand them and make sure they work for wider segments of the population than they were planned. Countries with weak or non-existent social programs for the victims of crises such as this will have to create them, and quickly. By the same token, basic principles of equity – and even more basic political realities – demand that those who received the main benefits of the boom have to bear their share of the costs of the bust. Governments that ignore the social and distributional implications of the crisis are likely to find themselves either driven toward extreme and counter-productive policies, or swept away.

Even sustaining existing social programs is extraordinarily difficult in such hard times. This is true of all governments, which face powerful fiscal pressures as tax revenues dry up and demands for spending soar. The difficulties are especially challenging for developing countries, many of which have lost whatever access they may have had to external sources of capital. Yet governments that do not provide effective relief to those hardest hit by the crisis face the prospect of dramatically increased social and political strife, which will only deepen the disaster.

·     At the international level, governments need to work just as consciously to coordinate not just words, but actions.

This will not happen of its own accord. So far, the solidarity of OECD central bankers has been impressive. However, this builds upon a long-standing tradition of the solidarity of central bankers, and upon decades of institutionalised collaboration, and can only take us a very short part of the way. There is nothing analogous on other dimensions.

The free interplay of government policies will not spontaneously bring forth international cooperation

Collaboration among governments has to be intended, designed, and monitored. This almost certainly requires some international institutional framework, some set of agreed-upon rules and ways of enforcing them. The governments of the major economic centres need to consult regularly on the international dimensions of the crisis, and of its resolution. They need to hold each other to account, and they need some reasonably independent mechanism to identify policies that risk driving governments toward conflict rather than mutual assistance. Other foreign policy goals can and should be linked to supportive efforts on the economic front.

Conclusion

If governments do not pay real attention to the domestic distributional impact of the emergency, and to the international implications of their national policies, the current calamity will feed on itself. The Great Depression of the 1930s was more a failure of national policy, and of international cooperation, than it was a failure of markets. Success in confronting the current crisis will similarly depend on socially responsive and viable national policies, and on globally responsive and viable international cooperation.

Editors' note: This column is a Lead Commentary on Vox's Global Crisis Debate page; see further discussion on Vox’s Global Crisis Debate page.

 

References

Jeffry A. Frieden (2006). Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century. W.W. Norton.

Frieden, Jeffry. 2007 /Will Global Capitalism Fall Again/?  Bruegel Essay and Lecture Series (Brussels:  Bruegel, 2007).

Frieden, Jeffry. 2008. "Global Governance of Global Monetary Relations: Rationale and Feasibility / Economics / Discussion Paper number 2008-32.

Europa procura um novo Bismarck - Timothy Garton Ash

OPINION

Can Europe Survive the Rise of the Rest?

By TIMOTHY GARTON ASH

The New York Times,  September 1, 2012

Oxford, England

WHO won the most medals at the Olympics? Europe. Who has the largest economy in the world? Europe again. And where do most people want to go on holiday? Europe, of course. On many measures of power, the European Union belongs with the United States and China in a global Big Three. Yet say that to officials in Beijing, Washington or any other world capital today and they would probably laugh out loud. As European leaders stagger into yet another round of crisis summitry, this potential superpower is widely viewed as the sick man of the developed world.

Why? The flawed design of the euro zone has made Europe’s recession more acute than America’s, and a collapse of the euro zone would drag the rest of the world economy down with it. But why haven’t Europeans shown the political will to save the euro zone by moving toward closer fiscal and political union? What happened to the forces that drove the project of European unification forward over the last 60 years? And, if those have faded, where might Europeans find new inspiration?

As I recently argued in Foreign Affairs, the five great drivers of European unification since the 1950s have now either disappeared or lost much of their energy.

First and foremost was the personal memory of war, and the mantra of “never again,” which motivated three generations of Europeans after 1945. But the last generation to have experienced World War II is passing on, and the collective memory is weak.

Second, the Soviet threat provided a powerful incentive for Western Europeans to unite during the cold war. And throughout the cold war, the United States was an active supporter of European integration, from the Marshall Plan to the diplomacy around German reunification. No longer. Try as he might, Vladimir Putin is no Joseph Stalin. And these days, the United States has other priorities.

Third, until the 1990s, the engine of European integration was the Federal Republic of Germany, with France at the steering wheel. Germans felt a powerful idealistic desire to rehabilitate themselves in the European family of nations — and had a hard national interest in doing so. For only by gaining the trust of their neighbors and international partners could they achieve German reunification. Now that national purpose has been accomplished, and European idealism has faded with the passing of the wartime generations. These days, Germany will no longer reach for its checkbook whenever Europe calls.

Fourth, the once captive nations of Eastern Europe are no longer uniformly passionate about the European Union even though their citizens have more recent memories of dictatorship, hardship and war. While Poland is one of the union’s most vigorous advocates, Hungary and the Czech Republic are now among its most skeptical and contentious members.

Finally, the widespread assumption that “Europe” would mean a rising standard of living and social security for all Europeans has been badly dented by accumulated debt, aging populations, global competition and the crisis of the euro zone. Young Greeks and Spaniards hardly see those benefits today.

Nonetheless, even in the most skeptical countries there is a basic understanding that it is better to belong to a single market of 500 million consumers, rather than depend on a domestic one of 50 million, or fewer than 10 million — the size of half the European Union’s current members.

And that is the beginning of the new case for European unification. While we Europeans should redouble our efforts to ensure that our continent does not forget its troubled past, the need for scale is the key to our shared future. The 21st-century world will be one of giants: weary old ones, like the United States and Russia, and hungry new ones, like China, India, Brazil and South Africa. You do not need to accept the most apocalyptic forecasts of European decline to acknowledge that Europe is unlikely to remain the world’s largest economy for long. In such a world, even Germany will be a small- to medium-size power.

IF Europeans are to preserve the remarkable combination of prosperity, peace, relative social security and quality of life that they have achieved over the last 60 years, they need the scale that only the European Union can provide.

In a world of giants, you had better be a giant yourself: A trade negotiation between China and the European Union is a conversation between equals; one between China and France is an unequal affair.

A decade ago, Chinese policy makers took the European Union seriously as an emerging political force, a potential new pole in a multipolar world. Today, they treat it with something close to contempt. They look to Brussels only in a few specific areas, like trade and competition policy, where the European Union really does act as one. Otherwise, they prefer to deal with individual nations, as this week’s reception in Beijing for Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, made clear.

The remedy lies in Europe’s own hands. Were it to move beyond the resolution of the euro zone crisis into a closer fiscal and political union, then onto a genuinely common foreign policy, China would take it more seriously, as would America and Russia.

And Europeans should not entirely abandon the hope — faint though it looks today — that their pioneering version of peaceful integration between previously warring states could point the way for better “global governance” in response to shared threats like climate change and to the tensions that inevitably arise between rising and declining powers. For without enhanced cooperation on a global scale, the 21st-century world may come to look like the late-19th-century Europe of rivalrous great powers, writ large. At best, Europe could become not just another giant; it could offer the example of a new kind of cooperative multinational giant.

When Ms. Merkel’s 19th-century predecessor Otto von Bismarck was shown a map of Africa by an eager German colonialist, the Iron Chancellor, dismissing the strategic value of faraway colonies, replied that the only map that mattered to him lay in Europe: “France is to the left, Russia to the right, we’re in the middle — that’s my map of Africa.” Today’s Europeans need to adapt Bismarck’s wisdom, declaring “China, India and Russia are to the right, America and Brazil to the left — that’s our map of Europe.”

Timothy Garton Ash is a professor of European studies at Oxford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on September 2, 2012, on page SR5 of the New York edition with the headline: Can Europe Survive The Rise of the Rest?

Capitalismo de Estado - Jorge Arbache

Crise e o capitalismo de Estado

Jorge Arbache

Valor Econômico, 2 de agosto de 2012

A The Economist publicou um provocativo relatório especial sobre capitalismo de Estado, modelo que, segundo a revista, "combina as forças do Estado com as forças do capitalismo". Desde então, o assunto ganhou atenção mundo afora e tem contribuído para os debates sobre a crise econômica e sobre modelos de desenvolvimento. A crescente influência das economias emergentes na economia mundial e a sua resiliência à crise financeira estariam por detrás do grande interesse pelo assunto. Contrariamente ao dirigismo muitas vezes observado até recentemente em muitos países em desenvolvimento, o capitalismo de Estado se utilizaria, segundo a revista, de instrumentos e métodos de gestão de mercado para atingir seus objetivos. O relatório justifica o foco nas experiências recentes dos países emergentes, notadamente a da China, porque elas "parecem ser cada vez mais a tendência futura".

As manifestações do capitalismo de Estado são variadas e podem ser complexas e sofisticadas, como as políticas públicas de apoio aos conglomerados privados sul-coreanos, ou a montagem de fundos soberanos com crescente influência nos fluxos de capitais e investimentos. Mas as experiências de capitalismo de Estado de países emergentes coexistem com manifestações de forte intervencionismo estatal na economia também nos países desenvolvidos, como no caso da empresa de petróleo estatal norueguesa, Statoil, e das políticas americana e europeia de subsídios ao setor agrícola. As experiências das diferentes vertentes de capitalismo de Estado sugerem haver em comum entre elas uma tensão, em maior ou menor grau, entre pragmatismo e ideologia.

Mais recentemente, as inéditas e massivas intervenções na economia pelos governos dos países no epicentro da crise financeira por meio de "quantitative easing" e "bailouts", por exemplo, têm provocado profundas repercussões na alocação de recursos e formação de preços não apenas no plano doméstico, mas, também, internacional. Essas intervenções, muitas delas oportunistas, são especialmente intrusivas devido ao tamanho dessas economias e ao fato de suas moedas serem reserva de valor internacional, criando e agravando desequilíbrios macroeconômicos internacionais e acentuando as condições já assimétricas de competição.

O emprego de políticas de capitalismo de Estado parece estar se popularizando mundo afora à medida que a crise econômica e as incertezas se agravam. O capitalismo de Estado da China e o fracasso de políticas econômicas ultra-liberais, como algumas perseguidas pelos Estados Unidos até antes da crise, nos ajudam a entender porque um dos prováveis legados dessa crise para os políticos é a lição de que governos não devem limitar os seus papéis na economia.

Embora seja compreensível a atratividade do capitalismo de Estado num contexto de crise econômica, a sua multiplicação em escala global tem implicações deletérias. De fato, parece ser pouco plausível que muitos países possam se beneficiar, simultaneamente, de políticas de capitalismo de Estado devido à falácia da composição e devido às externalidades negativas por elas provocadas, que tendem a desorganizar o sistema econômico, fomentar reações mercantilistas e alimentar tensões políticas entre países. Por isso, é muito provável que a popularização dessas políticas dificulte a recuperação da economia mundial. O emprego de políticas de capitalismo de Estado também suscita questões associadas às escolhas entre interesses nacionais e compromissos internacionais, como os do G-20, com reflexos para a credibilidade do sistema multilateral.

Para que se mitiguem a proliferação do capitalismo de Estado e seus potenciais riscos para o crescimento econômico mundial, será preciso que os países, notadamente Estados Unidos, União Europeia e China, reconheçam a interdependência das políticas micro e macroeconômicas nacionais e seus impactos nos países em desenvolvimento. Será preciso, assim, redobrar os esforços de coordenação de políticas e de gestão de interesses conflitantes. No entanto, experiências como o colapso do Acordo de Doha, crise do Euro e as dificuldades de avanço nos acordos do clima ilustram os desafios de coordenação e de solução de controvérsias em períodos de crise.

Como as políticas de capitalismo de Estado têm significativos impactos adversos na economia brasileira, incluindo valorização cambial, especulação com preços de ativos e barreiras ao comércio e ao investimento, torna-se necessário o emprego de estratégias de desenvolvimento e de inserção internacional que busquem mitigar esses impactos. Tais estratégias deveriam levar em conta a combinação dos benefícios do comércio com os das políticas públicas de promoção da indústria conciliada com o desenvolvimento e a exploração das vantagens produtivas e competitivas nacionais. Deveriam, também, reconhecer as relações entre comércio e variáveis macroeconômicas como câmbio, juros e política fiscal e seus impactos na indústria e no comércio, buscar o reconhecimento internacional dos impactos dos grandes desequilíbrios macroeconômicos e das políticas de outros países na economia brasileira, e intensificar esforços indutores do aumento da competitividade através da redução dos custos de produção e aumento da produtividade e dos investimentos em capital humano e inovação.

Brasil-Argentina: delongando o inevitável...

A Argentina é ciclotímica: a cada dez anos entra em crise, e no intervalo alterna as políticas, com um resultado previsível: ela sempre fica um pouco pior do que era. O cenário atual lembra o da fase pré-crise, quando o Brasil também se mostrou compreensivo com uma situação que já era inviável desde o início.
Porque dirigentes escolhem ser cegos?
Vai lá saber...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Brasil reduzirá superavit comercial com Argentina

NATUZA NERY, LUCAS FERRAZ
Folha de S.Paulo, 4/07/2012

BRASÍLIA - O governo Dilma Rousseff admite ganhar cerca de R$ 2 bilhões menos no comércio bilateral com a Argentina para ajudar o país vizinho num momento de agravamento de sua situação econômica.

A Argentina vive fuga de capitais, inflação em alta e desaceleração da indústria --e o Brasil sabe que terá de socorrer seu terceiro maior parceiro comercial.

Setores da economia brasileira --como automobilístico, têxtil e de alimentos-- serão prejudicados se a economia argentina se deteriorar mais. E é justamente o temor de contágio em áreas estratégicas que a Esplanada dos Ministérios tenta espantar.

Segundo a Folha apurou, há uma decisão não declarada oficialmente do Brasil de reduzir o superavit com a Argentina de R$ 5,8 bilhões em 2011 para R$ 4 bilhões.

A assessoria do Ministério do Desenvolvimento, Indústria e Comércio Exterior nega, mas a proposta já foi até apresentada ao lado argentino e prevê a fixação de cotas extraoficiais de exportação de produtos brasileiros.

Atualmente, diversos itens vendidos ao vizinho sofrem barreiras protecionistas. A ideia das cotas informais é justamente livrar produtos desse entrave, mesmo que haja um limite de venda.
As dificuldades enfrentadas pela Casa Rosada vêm erodindo a popularidade da presidente Cristina Kirchner.

Em Brasília, o sinal de alerta aparece também nos telegramas confidenciais emitidos por diplomatas brasileiros. A Folha teve acesso a algumas dessas mensagens oficiais. Em telegrama de janeiro deste ano, a embaixada brasileira em Buenos Aires prevê a continuidade da fuga cambial ao longo de 2012.

Dilma Rousseff também já ouviu relatos de assessores de que a taxa de câmbio apreciada na Argentina resultou em perda de competitividade, diminuindo as reservas.

NOVO TOM

A opção de superavit com a Argentina é uma mudança de tom em relação ao início do ano, quando ministros brasileiros falavam em represálias ao país vizinho. Revela, portanto, o nível de preocupação com o parceiro.

Apesar de as economias estarem interligadas, a Fazenda não faz diagnóstico apocalíptico dos efeitos de uma crise cambial sobre o Brasil.

Para Tristán Rodríguez, economista do Cadal (Centro para Abertura e Desenvolvimento da América Latina), o esfriamento da indústria brasileira afeta mais a Argentina do que o contrário.

Editoria de Arte/Folhapress

Iran: descendo na crise economica - NYTimes

A situação econômica do Irã é quase tão dramática, talvez um pouco pior, do que a da Venezuela, sua aliada política. Ambos países, a despeito de contarem durante anos com renda extraordinária do petróleo, conseguiram desmantelar as bases econômicas por singular má administração econômica. Mas a Venezuela pode ser considerada o país ainda mais infeliz, pois não sofreu sanções econômicas como o Irã.
Conhecemos este filme, da aceleração inflacionária, aumento da especulação, perda total de referência de preços, afundamento na crise e desespero dos mais pobres. O pior é que todo e qualquer dirigente político sabe, ou deveria saber, que esse caminho é para o desastre. Que não façam nada para reverter a direção testemunha de sua monumental incapacidade a dirigir o país.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Already Plagued by Inflation, Iran Is Bracing for Worse

Newsha Tavakolian for The New York Times

Shoppers at the Grand Bazaar in Tehran. Ali, a fruit vendor in the capital, asked: “Who in Iran can afford to buy a pineapple costing $15? Nobody.”

By THOMAS ERDBRINK

Published: July 1, 2012

• FACEBOOK
• TWITTER
• GOOGLE+
• EMAIL
• SHARE
• PRINT
• REPRINTS
• 

TEHRAN — Bedeviled by government mismanagement of the economy and international sanctions over its nuclear program, Iran is in the grip of spiraling inflation. Just ask Ali, a fruit vendor in the capital whose business has been slow for months.

Related

• News Analysis: U.S. Bets New Oil Sanctions Will Change Iran’s Tune (July 1, 2012)

• Times Topic: Iran

Connect With Us on Twitter

Follow@nytimesworldfor international breaking news and headlines.

Twitter List: Reporters and Editors

People hurried by his lavish displays of red grapes, dark blue figs and ginger last week, with few stopping to make a purchase. “Who in Iran can afford to buy a pineapple costing $15?” he asked. “Nobody.”

But Ali is not complaining, because he is making a killing in his other line of work: currency speculation. “At least the dollars I bought are making a profit for me,” he said.

The imposition on Sunday of new international measures aimed at cutting Iran’s oil exports, its main source of income, threatens to make the distortion in the economy even worse. With the local currency, the rial, having lost 50 percent of its value in the last year against other currencies, consumer prices here are rising fast — officially by 25 percent annually, but even more than that, economists say.

Increasingly, the economy centers on speculation. In this evolving casino, the winners seize opportunities to make quick money on currency plays, while the losers watch their wealth and savings evaporate almost overnight.

At first glance, Tehran, the political and economical engine of Iran, is the same thriving metropolis it has long been, the city where Porsche sold more cars in 2011 than anywhere else in the Middle East. City parks are immaculately maintained, and streetlights are rarely broken. Supermarkets and stores brim with imported products, and homeless people are a rare sight on its streets.

But Iran’s diminishing ability to sell oil under sanctions, falling foreign currency reserves and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s erratic economic policies have combined to create an atmosphere in which citizens, banks, businesses and state institutions have started fending for themselves.

“The fact that all those Porsches are sold here is an indicator that some people are profiting from the bad economy,” said Hossein Raghfar, an economist at Al Zahra University here. “Everybody has started hustling on the side, in order to generate extra income,” he said. “Everybody is speculating.”

Some, like Ali the fruit seller, who would not give his full name, exchange their rials for dollars and other foreign currencies as fast as they can. More sophisticated investors invest their cash in land, apartments, art, cars and other assets that will rise in value as the rial plunges.

For those on the losing end, however, every day brings more bad news. The steep price rises are turning visits by Tehran homemakers to their neighborhood supermarkets into nerve-racking experiences, with the price of bread, for example, increasing 16-fold since the withdrawal of state subsidies in 2010.

“My life feels like I’m trying to swim up a waterfall,” said Dariush Namazi, 50, the manager of a bookstore. Having saved for years to buy a small apartment, he has found the value of his savings cut in half by the inflation, and still falling. “I had moved some strokes up the waterfall, but now I fell down and am spinning in the water.”

Western sanctions have hurt, economists say, particularly in denying Iran access to foreign currency reserves, which it had used to prop up the rial. Yet economists also agree that much of the damage to the economy has been self-inflicted, saying that the Ahmadinejad government went on an import spending spree after oil revenues started hitting record levels from 2005 on.

With the government buying so many goods from abroad, many domestic producers were forced to lay off workers and close factories. That, in turn, has made Iran more vulnerable to international sanctions, they say. Companies that might have helped produce goods to replace those blocked by sanctions have long since gone out of business, as the owners shifted their wealth to speculation, building and selling properties, foreign currency or raw materials.

Near the industrial city of Pakdasht, outside Tehran, rows of factory buildings stood idle in the burning summer sun, heavy locks on their metal gates. In the distance, columns of Turkish trucks thundered past, swirling up clouds of dust. There were no buses bringing in new shifts of workers, and instead of mechanical clatter filling the air, stray dogs barked in the distance.

In one of the few factories still operating, Manoucher, 60, an engineer turned industrialist, recalled that only a decade ago being a factory owner in Iran meant not only a secure income but also social admiration as a job creator and someone who was building Iran’s future.

“Nowadays, it means you are a loser,” he concluded. Men in blue overalls peeked nervously up toward the director’s window, perhaps fearing they could be next to be laid off. “I am responsible for these people,” said Manoucher, who did not want to disclose either his family name or what his factory makes, because he sells products to a government company.

Business was extremely bad, he said, mainly because the government company had not paid its bills for six months. “I blame myself for feeling that speculation was beneath me,” he said. “My family and all my business partners would be rich now had we invested in building, lands and foreign exchange.”

For Iran’s army of employees, even state jobs no longer hold security. On Thursday, an official within Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps admitted in an interview with the corps’ own publication, Sobh-e Sadegh, that the government had been late in paying soldiers their wages.

Government officials and lawmakers have been quick to blame the West for Iran’s troubles. Last week, the head of Parliament, Ali Larijani, accused the Ahmadinejad administration of failing to take measures to “counter the enemy’s hostile policies.”

Many economists, though, say that even without the sanctions, Iran would still have big problems: a legacy of inflationary oil spending and budget-busting state subsidies of food, gasoline and other basic items that encouraged overconsumption and the steady erosion of the country’s industrial base.

“Many fundaments of the economy of our country have been destroyed over the past years,” said Mr. Raghfar, the economist. “And now, slowly but surely, the chickens have come home to roost.”

A version of this article appeared in print on July 2, 2012, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Already Feeling Pain, Iran Is Bracing for More Under New Oil Sanctions.