Iraq’s economy is going through at this stage of the age of modern Iraq in the most severe and accurate stages , the economy today faces challenges portend for a very big risk, something can not be ignored .
Previous Iraqi governments, and interspersed of corruption and nepotism and excesses on the public money, and circumvent on the law for personal interests, produced a distorted economy totally , thus sagging of administration in the joints of the state with the neglect of the rest of the economic partners from the private sector and the other with the result that Iraq was classified as a failed state.
If you look at the cases of abuse and corruption that befell the Iraqi state during the past years, we will see that more than 95% of cases of corruption and theft were inside the corridors of the public sector, especially the ministries and bodies of a financial and economic competence, and especially oil, which constitutes 95 percent of Iraq’s revenues, the remainder is in the private sector.
Studies and reports show that the number of employees in the public sector has reached more than 4.5 million employees and received more than 51 trillion Iraqi dinars, or about $ 42 billion »and this raises questions about the true size of the hands of working in Iraq, and is actually all of those are workers or it can be measured on the phenomenon of absent soldiers ??
Economic failure is associated with a deficit in the general budget and of course got the country into a state of bankruptcy until it has been now unable to pay salaries to its employees, nor the payment of the obligations imposed on it either internally or externally.
Economists at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank estimates the size of the financial crisis experienced by Iraq’s $ 50 billion between 2016 and 2019, and the truly that the figure may be inadequate for Iraq to get out from financial distress, especially with the torrent of corruption, which did not stop, the internal situation of war on terrorism and supporting the militias and the Iraqi army, not to mention the excesses of neighboring countries on Iraq and control its destiny, and we do not forget the size of the destruction left by the war on terror, and a lot of items that make this figure inadequate really.
Previous governments have wasted especially the previous government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a lot of opportunities to lift the Iraqi economy of the quagmire of bankruptcy, it is possible through the involvement of the private sector with the development efforts, stand next to the public sector to ease pressure on the state budget, but the government and the others were a safe haven for the corrupt and squatters on public money, and thus produced to us an empty balance and the exhausted economy on the brink of collapse, even 2014 was passed on Iraqis with no budget and this was reflected immediately on the overall aspects of life in the Iraqi state today noting that the poverty and unemployment indicators have reached to terrifying levels, accompanied by rising the general debt .
In fact is the right vision and good governance are the essence of the economic process in any country, but in the Iraqi model it was a completely different that the quota system and personalization are applied to the joints of the economy, without having future quest, so the money has gone and never to return, and the politicians of Iraq have missed the development opportunities through abundant imports, which were produced by the oil boom years, but the collapse of oil prices uncover the nakedness of Iraqi officials that those funds were not existed originally in the Iraqi treasury !!
Amer Al-Omran
Rawabet Center for Research and Strategic Studies