Iran’s PPP conversion factor rose nearly 14-fold as industry growth turned negative

By 2025, Iran’s industry had crossed from expansion into contraction. Alongside that reversal, the country recorded another increase in its purchasing-power conversion factor. The two measures told different stories: one tracked a rising local-currency comparison, while the other showed industrial activity shrinking after successive years of weaker growth.

Iran’s PPP conversion factor, which expresses local currency per international dollar on a purchasing-power basis, rose from 11,615 in 2015 to 157,796 in 2025. That put it at nearly 14 times its starting level. It increased for 10 straight years, with no annual reversal over that stretch. The longer rise went back to 1990.

The scale of that change was substantial, but the measure was a conversion factor, not a growth rate. Its nearly fourteenfold increase did not describe a matching expansion in the size of Iran’s economy. The finding concerned the amount of local currency represented by an international dollar in purchasing-power comparisons. Keeping that distinction clear separates the decade’s conversion trend from the record of industrial performance.

Industry’s path was markedly different. Growth in industrial value added, the value of output after subtracting inputs used in production, fell from 9.00% in 2022 to -4.78% in 2025. That was a decline of about 14 percentage points across three consecutive years of falling growth. The endpoint marked contraction, rather than merely a slower pace of expansion.

That distinction also matters within the industrial figures themselves. Falling growth and falling output are not interchangeable descriptions. Industry began the period with growth of roughly 9% and ended it with a decline of nearly 5%. The negative reading in 2025 established the contraction; the three-year sequence described the sustained weakening in its growth rate.

The periods overlapped but covered different spans. The conversion factor’s uninterrupted climb ran across the decade from 2015 to 2025. The industrial slowdown covered the shorter stretch from 2022 to 2025. At their shared endpoint, the local-currency conversion measure stood far above its earlier level, while industrial growth had dropped below zero. Neither measure substituted for the other: together, they documented a long rise in the conversion factor and a more recent deterioration in industry.

Built from 3 statistically detected findings; every figure traces to official multilateral data.