Economic benefits, investment rush

Arron Merat, the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Iran analyst and former Tehran correspondent for the Economist, told Middle East Eye about the prospective economic opportunities for Iran following the deal.

“In the short term the economic benefits will be great. Iran announced that there would be ‘tens of billions’ worth of dollars of frozen assets that would be released to them. That was announced at the briefing before the final announcement.

“Investment is going to rush in because Iran’s oil and gas infrastructure is basically creaking and it needs foreign direct investment in order to get a lot of these projects off the ground.

“Exporters are going to be able to get letters of credit from international creditors so they will be able to get back into business – so I think it is going to be big.

“Iran’s one of the few places in the world that has large untapped fields. This means that the oil isn’t very far beneath the surface so if you are an oil person and you are making a strategic decision about where to invest, Iran is going to be pretty high up.”