Sorena Sattari said efforts must be made to revise Iran's toxic petrodollar spending culture by clinging to and bolstering knowledge-based economy.
"The toxic culture of oil [dependence] which has imposed a misguided oil economy on our country, as it is the case in all other nations that lean on underground reserves to run their countries, must be changed which can be only possible through knowledge-based economy," said Sattari.
Iran expects to slash oil dependency to all-time lows, said Sattari early in January.
He said oil dependency in the new draft budget proposed for the next Iranian calendar year (which starts on March 21) would b around 30 percent which represents the lowest ever dependency of Iran's budget on oil revenues.
Sattari said that development could create a “golden opportunity” for Iran to move from the current oil-based economy to a knowledge-based one.
Iran is faced with an unprecedented downfall in the prices of oil at the international markets which, accompanied by West’s sanctions on Iran's oil exports, could further shrink the country’s actual earnings.
Iran's annual budget in 2013 also saw a 40-percent decrease in the projected oil incomes, a move described by the administration as making the budget extremely contradictory to respond to Western sanctions.
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