Iran’s cycle of hopelessness amid sluggish population growth

Sluggish population growth has increasingly posed a challenge for the Iranian regime in recent years. Iran’s population growth rate has slowed to 0.7 percent — a notably low rate, which is close to those seen in some European countries, whose rapidly aging societies have opened the door for immigration.
Not only does this low birth rate threaten the prospect of an aging Iranian society, creating potential labor shortages, along with healthcare and pension burdens in the future, but it is also possible that the situation will worsen due to a variety of factors, including harsh living conditions and the wish of many young Iranians to emigrate.
Saleh Qassemi, the head of Iran’s population strategic research center, has said the country’s population growth rate is expected to fall to zero in the next 10 to 15 years, which will have dangerous consequences on several levels, particularly in terms of the economy and productivity.
Iran’s significantly declining birth rate over the past few decades has seen the average family size among women of child-bearing age fall by more than three-quarters, from 6.8 children per household in the 1960s to fewer than two children in 2020 — and it continues on a downward trajectory. According to the state-run news agency IRNA, Iran needs to reach a natural population replacement rate of roughly 2.2 children per woman for the country to remain a dynamic society.
According to experts, Iran is set to fall into a so-called population hole if its current downward trajectory in national birth rate persists and falls below 1.3 children per woman. Population holes prompt countries to bring in immigrants to keep their economy running, as seen in some European and Western states, which have opened the door for immigrants to compensate for low birth rates and to keep the economic production cycle going.
The most serious of the economic challenges facing Iran as a result of its declining birth rate and rapidly aging society is the fall in the number of working-age citizens, leading inevitably to increased labor costs, as seen in European countries such as Germany. This will stifle local production levels, reduce productivity and international competitiveness, and increase societal consumption and dependency on national healthcare and pension programs. This will inevitably limit the expenditure of tax revenues on critical investment projects. Finally, it will place additional strains on the health and pharmaceutical industries, as well as on medical personnel such as doctors and nurses, who are already in short supply in Iran as many of them choose to emigrate.
The challenge posed by Iran’s slow economic growth intersects with the problematic phenomenon of brain drain in the country. Many Iranian couples prefer to restrict family size in order to improve their living conditions, while some married couples postpone child-rearing, preferring to emigrate before considering starting a family. Emigration has already increased significantly in recent years. Meanwhile, birth rates are consistently low among the highly educated and socioeconomically advantaged in Iran.
A revealing study conducted by America’s prestigious Stanford University, entitled “Migration and Brain Drain from Iran,” analyzing trends in Iranian migration, made some important findings. Firstly, the number of Iranian-born emigrants worldwide has increased in recent decades, from about 500,000 before the 1979 revolution to 3.1 million in 2019. The destinations for this massive emigration wave include the US, Canada, Germany and the UK.
The Stanford report also found that more than 700,000 Iranian-born students have attended foreign universities. The tendency of Iranians who study abroad to return to Iran after graduating has decreased sharply since the revolution, from 90 percent of all students in 1979 to less than 10 percent today.
Perhaps one of the study’s most important findings was that approximately 110,000 researchers of Iranian origin work in universities and research institutes outside Iran. This is a significant number, accounting for a third of all Iranian research personnel.
The same study also found that decades of bad governance, political repression, human rights violations, bleak economic prospects, corruption and other social and demographic factors were the most important causes of Iran’s massive brain drain. The researchers who compiled the report were themselves Iranian academics working at Stanford, some of whom studied in Tehran before continuing their education abroad.
Iran has, unknowingly, paid a high annual cost for this loss of its best and brightest young minds, with the World Bank estimating that the country has lost $50 billion per year because of brain drain. This is equivalent to Iran’s entire current annual revenue from exporting oil. Some Iranian officials are cognizant of this cost, putting it even higher. According to the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, former Iranian Science Minister Reza Faraji-Dana in 2014 estimated the cost at $150 billion.
In non-monetary standards, meanwhile, The Economist revealed another troubling finding: Between 2007 and 2012, 96 percent of patents registered by Iranian inventors were filed by those living in exile.

The challenge posed by Iran’s slow economic growth intersects with the problematic phenomenon of brain drain in the country.

Dr. Mohammed Al-Sulami

The most recent visible manifestation of Iran’s brain drain problem, which was clearly apparent amid the coronavirus pandemic, was a severe shortage of medical and nursing staff.
It is the Iranian people who have paid and continue to pay the price for this phenomenon in every way. Thousands have felt they have no option but to emigrate, with the most highly skilled and qualified leading the way, including university professors and other professionals, particularly experts in important scientific fields such as mathematics, physics and applied science. This deprives ordinary Iranians of future development opportunities.
Further exacerbating the cost for Iran is that the remaining educated and highly skilled people who are unable to emigrate and must remain in Iran are far more likely to have smaller families than the working class or unemployed, creating a cycle of hopelessness.

• Dr. Mohammed Al-Sulami is president of the International Institute for Iranian Studies (Rasanah). Twitter: @mohalsulami