Call for Ditching Paradigm of ‘Resource Depletion’ 

Why has the budget, the most important annual financial document of governments, lost its efficiency, including promotion of economic growth and stability, reduction of poverty and supply of public goods? Why has the budgeting process turned into a bureaucratic measure, the mere manipulation of numbers and division of the shares of organizations and institutions? 
Hossein Haqgou, an economic expert, prefaced his article for the Persian daily Ta’adol with these questions. A translation of the text follows: 
In the words of Masoud Nili, a veteran economist, Iran’s economy has experienced a prosperity based on “depletion of resources” for years. In this political economic paradigm, “consumption of resources has nothing to do with the supply of resources” and it is possible to consume natural and financial resources, or in other words, waste them by mandatory pricing, regardless of a basic principle in economics, i.e., “resource limitation”.