Iran's statisticians say the economy shrank 10.1 per cent. The quarter they measured ended in June.

Iran’s Statistical Center reported on Sunday that the country’s economy shrank 10.1 per cent, year on year, in the first quarter of the Persian year.²³ Take oil out and the fall is 4.6 per cent.¹ The quarter ran from March 21 to June 20. The war began with US and Israeli strikes on February 28.⁵

This is a government counting its own economy. Al Jazeera calls the Center “government-administered”.⁴ Tasnim, the Iranian agency, says the detailed tables sit on the national statistics portal.¹ This desk could not open that portal. What follows is the Center’s release as five outlets relay it, and that makes one dataset, not five confirmations.

Of the three main groups, one grew. Agriculture rose 2.3 per cent. Industries and mining fell 14.7 per cent and services fell 4.8 per cent.¹²

Crude oil and natural gas extraction is filed inside industries and mining.¹ Al Jazeera and Firstpost give that sub-sector’s fall as 26.4 per cent, a number that appears in neither the Tasnim nor the Radio Farda report.⁴⁵ Al Jazeera adds manufacturing, down 2.5 per cent.⁴

The levels behind the percentage come with a wrinkle. Tasnim prints GDP with oil, at constant prices of the Persian year 1400, as 21,795 against 24,255 a year earlier, in thousands of billions of rials.¹ Radio Farda, which says the Center’s report was carried by the Islamic Republic News Agency, IRNA, prints the same two numbers in billions of rials.² The digits agree. The units are a factor of a thousand apart, and the table that would settle it is the one not read here.

Tasnim’s headline puts growth for spring 1405 at minus 4 per cent. The line directly beneath it gives minus 10.1 with oil and minus 4.6 without.¹ Four is neither of them.

Firstpost opens by writing that the war “hit oil production, industry and economic activity”. Further down it notes that the Center “did not explicitly attribute the contraction to the war”.⁵ Tasnim’s relay of the release names no cause at all.¹ The figures fix the timing. They do not apportion the fall between the war and what Firstpost lists as problems Iran already had: US sanctions, a weakening rial and high inflation.⁵

The numbers around the release are each the work of whoever counted them. Al Jazeera puts 12-month average inflation at 69.9 per cent earlier this month, official unemployment at 9.1 per cent in the spring, and the rial at more than 2.2 million to the dollar in early September, against about one million a year earlier.⁴ Radio Farda puts inflation at about 80 per cent on the latest announced statistics and does not name the measure.² President Masoud Pezeshkian said on September 6 that total trade had fallen by 25 to 35 per cent, imports harder than exports.⁴

Al Jazeera, citing estimates from Kpler and Vortexa, says Iranian crude and condensate loadings fell from about two million barrels per day in March to roughly 740,000 in July and 220,000-255,000 in August.⁴ July and August lie outside the quarter the Center measured. Firstpost makes the same point from the other side: the figures cover only the first quarter, and what they mean for the year depends on the quarters that follow.⁵

Chris Beauchamp, a market analyst at IG Group, told Al Jazeera the drop “is a sign that the US is succeeding in putting pressure on its foe”. The question, he said, is “whether Iran can weather the fall in economic activity better than the US can stand the surge in energy costs”.⁴ Iran’s security chief, Mohsen Rezaei, told Al Jazeera on Saturday that Tehran’s conditions for ending the war include “the release of our frozen funds and an end to the naval blockade”.⁴

The Center’s minus 10.1 per cent stops at June 20.⁵ The loadings estimates run from about two million barrels a day in March to 220,000-255,000 in August.⁴ No figure read here measures Iran’s economy after the quarter closed. The next thing to watch is the Center’s accounts for the summer.