Pahlavi-era oil revenues grew eightyfold amid rapid uneven prosperity.

Evidence

Between 1963 and 1976, GDP per capita grew at unprecedented rates that averaged 8.0 percent per year … Iran’s per capita income moved well above the average for developing countries and was quickly closing its gap with the average income levels in Western Europe. At its peak in 1976, per capita income in Iran had reached about 64 percent of the average for 12 Western European countries. (Esfahani and Pesaran 2009, 189) … The driving engine for the country’s economic growth was the dramatic increases in oil revenues, which jumped from 300 million in 1963, to 5 billion in 1973, and to $24 billion in 1977 – an 80-fold increase over a period of 14 years. As is often the case in the early stages of rapidly growing economies, not all segments of the population benefitted equally from the country’s new prosperity. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 1702

Categorization

• SHARE: Concrete data anchor (oil jumped 300M to 24B, 80x in 14 years) for anyone writing on petrostate modernization or the shah’s legitimacy crisis.