Development and perspectives of ethical finance in Iran

Iran has a rich and old tradition of ethical finance and economics. Well before the Islamic Revolution, institutes and initiatives were active in encouraging an inclusive vision of economy. Although re-elaborated under a different light, these concepts survived in the current Constitution, which defines economy using a “social” approach (art.43). Under this light, the legality of capitalism and that of the use of private investment are one of the pillars of economy itself (art.44) only if subordinated to religiously inspired ethical principles of justice and equity and in a way that makes of them a mere complement to State or to the corporative actors. Religious guidance is therefore immanent even in the very own definition of economy as a mean, and not as an end, to get social purposes like, inter alia, welfare, elimination of poverty and abolition of deprivation of means of self-sustainment. State-driven economics was nevertheless a prominent concept in original Iranian constitutional thought. Starting from the Nineties, financial and economic reforms have been leading the system from a corporatist vision that characterised the first fifteen years of existence of the Islamic Republic to a more actual social market, putting in discussion and somewhat re-inventing the relationship between the public and the private.