His Eminence Ayatollah Khamenei, the Grand Leader of the Islamic Revolution, declared the general policies of the Fifth Development Plan to President Ahmadinejad.
These general policies have been declared within the framework of the document, Twenty Year Perspective and from the perspective of establishing progress and justice.
The General Policies of the Fifth Development Plan has 45 points and includes the following articles: cultural affairs; scientific and technical affairs; social affairs, economic affairs, and politics; defense; and security affairs.
The text of the declaration by the Supreme Leader to the president, which was sent simultaneously to the Majlis President, the Chief of the Judiciary, and the President of the Expediency Council, is as follows:
In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate
The country’s fifth Five Year Plan, oriented towards accomplishing the phased goals which accord with the document Twenty Year Perspective, has been prepared. We hereby declare the general policies of the Fifth Plan, which must be based upon what has been laid out in the Fifth Five Year Plan Development Law of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
It is expected that these policies, which have been organized on the basis of the perspective of progress and justice, should be manifest in all the country’s activities, whether in law or in practice. Your Excellency’s concern and attention and that of the honorable cabinet and the honorable Islamic Consultative Assembly and the other leadership institutions of the system will be able play a decisive role in this matter. I expect that in the coming five year period, essential steps to institute an Iranian-Islamic model – which is essential for human development based on truth, justice, and the achievement of a society based on Islamic and revolutionary values, and which realizes the indicators of social and economic justice through the country’s three institutions [the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary] – will emerge.
Earnest participation of the seminary and university thinkers in expressing a discourse of justice and its prerequisites shall play a decisive role in this matter. I sincerely thank the esteemed Expediency Council, the esteemed cabinet, and the Council’s secretariat as well as the active and cooperative experts who together have played a laudable role in organizing the recommendations related to the Five Year Plan’s general program’s policies.
A copy of the list of policies is simultaneously being sent to the Islamic Consultative Assembly and the Expediency Council.
Sayyed Ali Khamenei
The General Policies of the Fifth Economic, Social, and Cultural Development Plan by the Grand Leader of the Revolution
Cultural Affairs
1) Completing and implementing an engineering-cultural plan and preparing a cultural connection for important plans.
2) Keeping alive the religious and political ideas of Imam Khomeini (God’s mercy be upon him!) and emphasizing their role as a fundamental criterion in all policy making and planning.
3) Strengthening the rule of law, social discipline, scrupulousness, spirit of social work, initiative, proper conduct, satisfaction, avoidance of waste, and focus on the quality of production.
4) Confronting deviant currents in the religious seminaries and reducing superstition.
5) Using the optimal intelligence and social technology to achieve the system’s cultural ends.
6) Creating a common understanding of the Twenty Year Perspective and strengthening national belief and determination for achieving it.
Scientific and Technical Affairs
7) Development in the higher educational and research system in the following fields:
a. Increasing the research budget to 3% of GDP by the end of the Fifth Plan and increasing the entry of college graduates of undergraduate programs to the graduate level by 20%.
b. Reaching second place in science and technology in the region and stabilizing it in the Fifth Plan.
c. An effective relationship between the universities and research centers with industry and sectors connected to society.
d. Enabling the non-governmental sector to participate in scientific and technical production.
e. Gaining access to needed advanced technologies.
8) Developing the educational system to raise its quality based on the country’s needs and priorities in the three spheres of education, skills, and upbringing as well as improving teachers’ spiritual and physical health.
9) The development and improvement of the humanities by strengthening their prestige, attracting capable and motivated individuals, reforming and revising their educational pillars, programs, and policies, improving the quantity and quality of research centers and activities and fostering theorizing, criticism, and free thought.
10) Distributing material and moral aid for distinguished scientific and technical inventors through
a. Raising their social prestige;
b. Raising the level of science and skill;
c. Removing concerns about financial risk in stages of inventors’ research and experimentation and aid in marketing their results.
11) Completing and implementing an inclusive national scientific plan.
Social Affairs
12) Strengthening the institution of the family and the position of women therein and in the social sphere, and fulfilling the rights of women under sharia and law in all fields, with particular attention to their constructive role.
13) Strengthening the national character of the youth in relation to the Islamic revolution’s aspirations, presenting them with an atmosphere for intellectual and scientific development and striving to eliminate concerns about employment, marriage, housing, and their social suffering, with attention to the exigencies of youth and their needs and abilities.
14) Reforming the administrative and legal system in order to
a. Increase its flexibility and efficiency;
b. Increase it delivery of services to the people;
c. Secure the dignity and wellbeing of its employees;
d. Employing worthy and trusty managers and judges and guaranteeing them employment;
e. Removing or merging superfluous parallel administrations;
f. Emphasizing decentralization in administrative and executive spheres;
g. Preventing administrative corruption and struggling against it; and
h. Drafting the necessary laws.
15) Lending character to the features of city and countryside, reconstructing and maintaining Iranian-Islamic buildings, observing advanced criteria for making buildings, saving and fortifying structures.
16) Strengthening a system of inspection and supervision and putting it into operation, reforming laws and stipulations with the intention of removing overlaps between the duties of supervisory and inspection institutions.
17) Prioritizing martyrs of the Islamic Revolution in matters of financial sources and opportunity and resources and government responsibilities in various cultural and economic fields.
18) Commitment to developing exercise and supporting the spread of tourism, emphasizing pilgrimages.
19) Emphasizing every facet of a lifestyle of a healthy man:
a. Unity in setting policy, planning, evaluation, supervision, and allocating public resources.
b. Raising indicators of clean air, safe food and environment, and physical and mental health.
c. Reducing health-threatening pollution.
d. Improving the way society is fed through improving the composition and soundness of food.
e. Quantitative and qualitative development of health insurance and reducing the people’s share of the cost of health to 30% by the end of the Fifth Plan.
20) Increasing social security:
a. An all-sided struggle against addictive and psychoactive substances and attention to implementing general policies in the struggle against addictive substances.
b. Reorganizing slums and pursuing and controlling social inequalities resulting from them.
c. Utilizing cultural, educational, and media tools to pursue and confront cultural and social inequalities.
Economic Affairs
A) An appropriate economic development based on:
21) Achieving a sustainable and vibrant economic growth at a rate of at least 8% of GDP with
a. A development of investment through a reduction of the savings gap, i.e., investment while maintaining the proportion of savings to GDP at at least 40% and attracting sources of foreign investment;
b. Raising the rate of profit in economic growth by a third by the end of the Fifth Plan;
c. Improving the country’s trade atmosphere based on a stabilization of the macroeconomic atmosphere, providing the necessary communication, information, legal, and scientific and technological substructure, reducing macroeconomic risk, regularly preparing figures and information to society in a transparent and systematic fashion.
d. Strengthening and developing a standard national system.
22) Changing the perspective on oil and gas and the income obtained there from to becoming a resource and capital for economic vitality, instead of a source to secure the public budget, and creating a National Development Fund whose budget is to be ratified by the Islamic Consultative Assembly in the first year of the Fifth Program, planning to use the relative profit of oil and gas in an industrial and service chain and reducing dependency on them, following the criteria:
a. Investing at least 20% of the annual resources obtained from the export of oil and gas and their derivatives into the National Development Fund;
b. Easing access to the private, the cooperative, and the non-state public sectors for the National Development Fund’s resources with the aim of producing and developing investment domestically and abroad, taking into consideration conditions of competition and appropriate economic returns.
c. Cutting the dependency of the government’s current expenses on oil and gas income by the end of the plan.
23) Reforming the banking system’s structure through a thorough implementation and repair of the law of interest-free banking, institutionalizing free loans, and securing microcredit and the necessary credit for major investments.
24) Quantitatively and qualitatively improving financial markets (capital, money, and insurance), emphasizing efficiency, transparency, and soundness.
25) Achieving the general policies of Article 44 of the Constitution and the requirements related to each of its sections, emphasizing:
a. Support for the formation of competitive markets;
b. Creating relevant structures for fulfilling governing duties (policy making, leadership, and supervision);
c. Drafting policies to encourage unorganized activities (family institution) into salaried unit activities.
d. Creating a competitive market for offering medical insurance services.
26) Attention to the economic, security, and environmental value of water in accelerating its usage, supplies, preservation, and consumption and keeping water from leaving the country, prioritizing the joint use of aquatic resources.
27) Investing in the joint extraction of gas and oil and mines with neighboring countries based on the general political criteria of Article 44 of the Constitution.
28) Maintaining a strategic financial reserve sufficient to secure the country’s basic needs in a fixed period (as determined by the Supreme Council of National Security.)
29) Emphasizing a strategy of export development, particularly in the high tech service sector, in such a way that the non-oil balance of trade will be reduced and a balance of trade in services will be created.
30) An all-sided development of cooperation with the countries in the South Asian region in trade, investment, and technology.
31) Promoting and coordinating among the development goals of education, health, and employment, in such a way that by the end of the Fifth Plan the indicators of human development will reach those of the countries with high human development.
32) Transforming the country’s budget system to operational budgeting.
33) Establishing qualitative and quantitative relations between the Five Year Plan and the annual budgets with the document Perspectives, based on the criteria of transparency and supervisability.
B) The spread of social justice by:
34) Organizing all activities related to economic growth and development based on social justice, decreasing the difference between the classes’ incomes and eliminating deprivation from low-income layers based on the following points:
a. Compensating for unjustified inequalities in income through tax policies, giving grants, and insurance mechanisms.
b. Completing an information bank relevant for the lower two deciles in income and continuing to update them.
c. Giving public grants and gradually implementing non-public grants.
d. Securing a uniform social use of economic information.
35) Taking the requisite measures to compensate for backwardness stemming from past historical ages, emphasizing
a. Raising the level of income and living standards of the villagers and farmers by preparing village development plans and developing industrialization, village industries, new services and a reform of the system of pricing agricultural goods.
b. Spreading economic activities in border areas and the southern shores and islands, taking advantage of the country’s foreign trade potential.
c. Reducing the gap between society’s two highest and lowest deciles of income so that the Gini coefficient will be at most .35 at the end of the program.
d. Taking the measures necessary for reducing the country’s unemployment rate to 7%.
e. Guaranteeing comprehensive and effective insurance and a qualitative and quantitative development of the social security system and medical insurance services.
f. Supporting deprived groups and female heads of households.
g. Developing the cooperative sector with the goal of strengthening the social groups with middle and lower incomes so that the cooperative sector will reach 25% [of the economy] by the end of the Fifth Plan.
Political, Defense, and Security Affairs
36) Strengthening the people’s presence and participation in the political, social, economic, and cultural fields.
37) Orienting political currents to cleave to Islamic revolutionary values, the defense of the national interest, weakening the enemy, accepting the rule of law, and moral values.
38) Supporting legitimate freedoms and preserving the nation’s basic rights.
39) Raising the prestige, status, power, and role of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the region and the international system in order to strengthen national security and advance the national interest, emphasizing:
a. Strengthening bilateral, regional, and international cooperation, prioritizing neighboring countries.
b. Strengthening constructive relations with nonbelligerent countries.
c. Benefiting from relations to increase national strength.
d. Confronting bullying and aggressive measures in foreign affairs.
e. Striving to liberate the region from foreign military presence.
f. Supporting Muslims and oppressed and abased nations, particularly the nation of Palestine.
g. Striving to reform the structure of the United Nations.
h. Organizing joint efforts to create new regional and international economic, political, and cultural relations with the aim of guaranteeing world justice, peace, and security.
40) Striving to create development in current procedures based on Islamic values through an active and purposeful presence in international and regional organizations.
41) Raising Iran’s managing role in the distribution and transportation of energy, increasing export opportunities, attracting capital and advanced technology and helping establish an independent monetary, banking, and insurance system with the help of the regional, Islamic, and friendly countries with the aim of reducing dependence on the ruling monetary system.
42) Strengthening cultural, legal, political, and economic collaboration with the world, particularly those within the sphere of Islamic-Iranian civilization.
43) Strengthening the Islamic and Iranian identity of Iranians abroad, helping spread the Persian script and language among them, supporting their rights, and helping them participate in national development.
44) Fortifying and elevating permanent comprehensive security guaranteeing national goals and interests, emphasizing the following:
a. Strengthening the role of the people and popular intelligence in pursuing anti-security activities.
b. Strengthening effective collaboration of the intelligence, security, and judicial institutions and coordination between them to secure an intelligence presence and confront any kind of disturbance in public, economic, and social security and confront soft threats.
c. Creating a united system of information software, raising the level of protection of computerized information, the development of sciences and technologies related to protecting the security of information and communications systems with the aim of protecting the space for exchanging data, technical strengthening to confront violations in computer networks and protecting public and private space.
d. Increasing defensive deterrence capabilities with the aim of defending sovereignty; striving for the presence of popular forces in security and the defense of the country and the revolution through a qualitative and quantitative mobilization of the abased.
e. Developing passive defenses.
f. A lasting security of the border areas and effective control of the borders.
45) Territorial integrity, and national interests and security, and offering an effective reaction to foreign threats and creating a regional balance emphasizing:
a. Acquiring new knowledge and technology and advanced defensive software, and updating and repairing defensive industries,increasing the self-sufficiency ratio by developing research and utilizing all the country’s industrial potential.
b. Striving for the presence of the popular forces in security and the defense of the country and the revolution through a quantitative and qualitative mobilization of the abased.
c. Developing passive defensives.
d. Lasting security for the border regions and effective control thereof.