Economic expert, Ziad Al-Hashemi, revealed on Monday that the government failed to secure the investments required to finance the development road project.

Al-Hashemi stated in a post on his personal Facebook page, followed by “Al-Eqtisad News”, that “the first victim of the failures of the Development Road Project – news of the dismissal of the Director General of the Iraqi Railways, who boasted in one of the meetings with me that he had a feasibility study for the Development Road Project that included 27 volumes.”

He added that “it seems that the internal differences and problems related to the method of managing the Development Road Project file have begun to appear on the surface in the form of dismissals.”

Al-Hashemi stressed that “the government’s failure to secure the necessary investments to finance the project revealed many flaws in the way this project is managed”

and considered that “as a quick and logical solution, the government should focus on extending and establishing the land highway linking with Turkey and postponing the railway line until the conditions are right to truly launch the wheel of development.” It is noteworthy that the Minister of Transport, Razzaq Muhaibis Al-Saadawi, dismissed the Director General of Railways, Younis Khaled Jawad, and appointed Jabbar Aliwi Lahis as his replacement

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Tishwash:  Prime Minister’s Advisor Announces New Tax Reform Packages to Be Launched Soon

The Prime Minister’s Advisor for Financial Affairs, Mazhar Mohammed Saleh, announced on Monday the most prominent government steps to maximize non-oil revenues, while indicating the imminent launch of new tax reform packages.

Saleh said, as reported by the official news agency, and reviewed by “Al-Eqtisad News”, that “one of the basic principles of the government’s program in the field of financial reform, which was approved by the Council of Representatives in October 2022, is maximizing non-oil resources in the general budgets of the Republic of Iraq, as quantitative targets were set for them so that their contribution to the total revenues generated by non-oil economic activity would increase to 20 percent instead of their historical rates that do not exceed 10 percent in the best of cases.”

He added, “Diversifying non-oil revenue sources and maximizing them in public budgets is one of the biggest reform challenges in the financial and economic fields in the country.”

He pointed out that “these challenges come from two main factors: the first is the degree of connection between the diversification of budget resources and the success of diversification in the country’s gross domestic product, especially the three sectors of agriculture, industry and services.”

He explained that “the oil production sector still dominates a percentage of the components of that gross domestic product, which sometimes reaches 60 percent, which gives the national economy a rentier character and direct coexistence with the financial flows provided by the oil resource, mostly without anything else.”

He added, “The second factor of these challenges is related to non-governmental activity in generating the gross domestic product, and we mean specifically the activity of the market or the private sector.”

He added, “The majority of economic forces generating income and wealth within market activity conduct their economic activities within the framework of what is called the ‘shadow economy’, which are ‘grey’ markets that are not regulated and are not known to the regulatory, tax and banking authorities as is commonly known, and their percentage amounts to about 70 percent of the total private sector activity in the country.”

He stressed that “the grey or shadow markets are one of the most important factors causing the decline in non-oil revenues in the country’s general budget components.”

He pointed out that “the first step taken by the current government to maximize non-oil revenues began with adopting a new approach to tax reform,” noting that “the Council of Ministers approved earlier this year 8 new packages to reform the country’s tax system, led by the principle of expanding tax bases, especially those that are hidden, evading or neglecting annual tax accounting.”

He stressed by saying: “Two tax reform packages have been launched, and the remaining packages will be launched sequentially and gradually within the government’s reform policy in the financial field and maximizing the state’s resources from sources of income and wealth outside the oil sector, as this is accompanied by administrative and legislative reform and high-precision digital governance of tax institutions in the areas of assessment and collection with high transparency and efficiency