Marriage Age Gap, Internal Migration & Post-Revolution Exile Population (1956-1991)_

Event_Log

1. 011962Land Reform Law first stage enactedAssociation

   Prime Minister Ali Amini's government, acting through Agriculture Minister Hassan Arsanjani, enacts a Land Reform Law limiting individual landownership to one village and mandating sale of excess land to tenant farmers at controlled prices -- the opening measure later folded into the White Revolution program.

   Why this link: The share of Iranians still residing in their shahrestan (county) of birth fell from 89% (1956, a pre-land-reform baseline) to 77.6% (1986), consistent with the rural-to-urban migration wave associated with the White Revolution's land reform (which left many smallholding tenant farmers without secure land tenure even as it nominally redistributed land) combined with oil-boom-era urban industrial job growth pulling labor toward Tehran and other cities.

   Caveat: This 30-year span bridges land reform, the entire 1960s-70s oil-boom industrialization era, AND the 1979 revolution/Iran-Iraq War -- several large, independently migration-inducing events sit inside this one window (the White Revolution referendum itself, 1963-01-26, is arguably as good or better an anchor than the Jan 1962 first-stage law). Attributing this multi-decade trend to land reform specifically, rather than industrialization broadly or war-driven displacement in the window's final years, is a soft, gradual-context call, not a sharp inflection-point match.

   Lag: gradual over 2+ decadesSource: The Cambridge History of Iran - Land Reform in Iran
2. 021979Islamic RevolutionAssociation

   Mohammad Reza Shah's government falls; the Islamic Republic is proclaimed under Ayatollah Khomeini on 1 April 1979.

   Why this link: The chart's own sourced figure of roughly 3 million Iranians who went into exile (US, Europe, India and Turkey combined) is explicitly attributed by its own citation (Bozorgmehr and Sabbagh) to 'the 1978-79 revolution + Iran-Iraq war era' -- one of the most extensively documented mass-emigration episodes in modern Iranian history, spanning the immediate 1979 flight of the Pahlavi elite/royalists and religious/ethnic minorities (Baha'i, Jewish, Armenian communities disproportionately represented) through 1980s draft-age emigration to avoid Iran-Iraq War conscription.

   Caveat: The ~3 million figure is a single aggregate estimate spanning BOTH the revolution AND the 8-year war combined, not annually dated -- it cannot be decomposed into 'how much was 1979 alone vs. how much accrued during the war' with this data alone. Confidence reflects a well-documented aggregate link, not a precisely time-resolved one; the Iran-Iraq War begins event (1980-09-22) is a genuine co-cause, not ruled out.

   Lag: immediate, continuing through the 1980s war yearsSource: Encyclopaedia Britannica