Salehi-Isfahani is clearly sympathetic to reformists, and also to
their neoliberal economic understanding of Iran, so obviously his view
of Rafsanjani differs from mine, but even he notes that, despite
poverty reduction and relative stability of overall inequality even in
the post-Khomeini era, individual earning inequality (as opposed to
overall inequality) and economic insecurity have risen due to reforms:
e.g., "Individual earnings also mark the rise in inequality of
earnings in the post reform period (after 1989) more sharply than
household expenditures or incomes" (p. 34) and "When the reforms began
60 percent of wage and salary workers were employed in the public
sector, compared to 40 percent in 2004" (Salehi-Isfahani, p. 42).
>From working people's points of view, transfer payments, social
programs, etc. that managed to stabilize overall inequality did not
eliminate their discontent.
Moreover, the electoral contest that pit Ahmadinejad against Rafsanjani happened in the midst of oil boom, and boom years tend to sharpen people's discontent. In countries whose economies and state revenues are highly dependent on one or two extractive industries, the question of distribution of profits from them tends to get very politicized in boom years, and especially so in countries like Iran whose history began in social revolution aiming for social justice and whose economy is very statist. Last but not the least, just about everyone agrees that Rafsanjani is among the richest men in Iran, and he was and still is perceived to have been one of the biggest beneficiaries of post-Khomeini economic reforms.
You cite Salehi-Isfahani:
> [T]hese results question the suggestion that pro-market reforms
> during the Rafsanjani and Khatami administrations left the poor
> behind, and thus contributed to the reformists' electoral defeat in
> June 2005. As it happens, the largest declines in poverty coincided
> with periods of reform, suggesting that, to the contrary, reforms may
> have been good for the poor.
In terms of facts, there is no contradiction between rises in earnings inequality and declines in absolute poverty in the periods of reform that coincided with economic growth. What Salehi-Isfahani fails to consider is that Iran's workers want more than declines in absolute poverty and resent rising earnings inequality and economic insecurity that came with reforms. -- Yoshie