The session focused on a dimension of Iran that tends to receive less attention: its economy. To address it, INCIPE welcomed Alexandre Muns, who holds a degree in Geography and History and a PhD from the University of Barcelona. Since 1998 he has taught international economics, international economic institutions, and European integration at several universities, including Pompeu Fabra University, the International University of Catalonia, the Rovira i Virgili University, and EAE Business School. He has served as senior advisor and speechwriter to presidents of the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and previously coordinated the Europe and Transatlantic Relations program at the CIDOB Foundation and directed studies at the American Chamber of Commerce in Spain. The author of nearly ten books (the most recent, Globalism versus Nativism, published in 2019, on the impact of technological change on the labor market), he has contributed to press, radio, and television since 1992, and currently writes for Cinco Días, El País, La Razón, and Economía Digital.

The starting portrait of the Iranian economy is one of a large but impoverished country. With more than 86 million inhabitants and a GDP of close to 375 billion dollars, ranking the country 44th in the world, Iran does not reach 4,300 dollars in per capita income. The International Monetary Fund forecasts a 6.1% contraction for 2026, following growth of 5.3% in 2023 and 3.7% in 2024, and estimates that inflation, close to 40% in recent years, could soar to 68% this year; some sources already place it in triple digits. Muns also highlighted structural features that predate the war: a labor participation rate of 40%, twenty points below the global average, and around 32 million people living on less than 8.30 dollars a day. He also noted that Iran has not submitted to the Fund’s annual consultations since 2018, which reduces the precision of otherwise fairly solid figures.

Oil plays a central role in the country’s economy. Iran was among the world’s leading producers, with close to 4.4 million barrels per day, but the U.S. blockade has strangled its access to the market: from exporting more than two million barrels per day in 2023, it has fallen to just 50,000–60,000 in May of this year, 2026. Nine out of every ten barrels it still exports end up in China. Notably, in May alone, Gulf producers (Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Iraq, and Iran itself) lost more than eleven million barrels per day in output due to the inability to transit the Strait of Hormuz, a strait through which twenty million barrels per day used to flow before the conflict.

Regarding Iran’s nuclear program, Alexandre Muns outlined its historical trajectory, from its beginnings in 1973 to the 2015 agreement among the major powers, which lifted sanctions and returned around 100 billion dollars in frozen assets to Iran in exchange for limits on uranium enrichment. He then recalled the U.S. withdrawal in 2018 and the reimposition of sanctions by the UN Security Council in September 2025. The key, he explained, lies in enrichment thresholds: 5% is sufficient to generate electricity, 60% corresponds to military or scientific uses, and 90% is only useful for building a weapon. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran’s reserves enriched to 60% would be enough to produce around ten bombs within weeks, should Tehran decide to take that step.

Muns also highlighted the key role played by the so-called “shadow fleet,” the mechanism through which Iran has been circumventing the blockade. A recent Wall Street Journal investigation puts the volume of crude exported since December aboard tankers flying flags of convenience at around 90 million barrels.

The final part of the session turned to legal aspects and the aggregate cost of the conflict. Iran’s claim to charge a toll for transit through Hormuz runs counter to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, ratified by 172 countries, and would set, Muns warned, a dangerous precedent: nothing would then prevent the same logic from being applied to other straits, such as Malacca. At the macroeconomic level, the IMF has lowered its growth forecast for the Middle East and North Africa from 3.9% to 1.1%, and its global forecast from 3.3% to 3.1%. Estimates of the damage to the Iranian economy exceed 100 billion dollars, a figure the Tehran government itself puts as high as 270 billion.

The session closed with a Q&A segment addressing issues such as Iran’s adaptation to sanctions, the distribution of winners and losers in the Gulf, the Revolutionary Guard’s growing control over the economy as a whole, and the weight of China and Russia as props for the regime. The discussion left one underlying idea: the Iranian economy has become one of the principal barometers of the crisis, capable of revealing both the country’s resilience and its vulnerability at once—and will likely remain so for as long as the standoff over the Strait of Hormuz continues.

Aranzazu Álvarez