Product-market regulation, entry barriers, licensing burdens, network-industry regulation, price controls.
Size of cash and near-cash transfer programmes (unemployment benefits, means-tested assistance, universal child benefits). Architecturally distinct from forced-saving schemes — see condition welfare_architecture.
Trade policy openness — tariffs, non-tariff barriers, FTAs, industrial protection.
Security of private property rights — formal recognition, expropriation risk, titling systems.
From the early post-revolution years through the late 2000s, the Islamic Republic operated a vast price- subsidy system covering petrol, diesel, natural gas, electricity, bread, cooking oil and other staples, with implicit fiscal cost peaking at roughly a quarter of GDP and per-capita energy consumption among the highest in the region. Subsidies were administered through state-set retail prices, foreign-exchange preferences and direct allocations to state energy companies, generating large smuggling rents at the border and persistent under-investment in domestic refining and electricity capacity.
Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.
Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".
Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.