April 11, 2008 | By NAZILA FATHI

TEHRAN — President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has decided to dismiss his economics and interior ministers, a government spokesman said in Iranian newspaper accounts published Thursday.

No reason for the shake-up was given by the spokesman, Gholamhossein Elham, but the dismissal of the economics minister in particular comes as Iran faces growing economic problems despite a revenue windfall from high oil prices.

An increasing number of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s domestic critics are angry about the country’s pervasive inflation, which by the Central Bank’s calculation has reached an annual rate of 18 percent. Iran’s economy has also suffered because of trade sanctions and other restrictions imposed by the United Nations in response to the Iranian refusal to stop uranium enrichment.

Only a week ago, Mr. Elham dismissed rumors about a cabinet shake-up as an April Fools’ Day joke.

It was not immediately clear from Mr. Elham’s published announcement who would replace the economics minister, Davoud Danesh Jaffari, or the interior minister, Mostafa Pourmohammadi. Nor was it clear when the dismissals were to take effect.

Both ministers, however, are among a group of cabinet ministers who were said to be favored by the country’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, when Mr. Ahmadinejad took office in 2005. The interior minister, Mr. Pourmohammadi, is a midranking cleric known to be close to the ayatollah.

With the latest dismissals, Mr. Ahmadinejad has removed 8 of the original 21 members of his cabinet, including the country’s veteran nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, who was also close to Ayatollah Khamenei.

The daily newspaper Etemad Melli, in a harshly critical editorial on Mr. Ahmadinejad’s performance, called his cabinet shake-ups a “management catastrophe,” and said no ministers could make long-term plans because they feared dismissal at any time.

The daily newspaper Kargozaran published a critical commentary by a reformist politician, Hossein Marashi, who wrote that the president should at least explain the dismissals.

“People should know that Mr. Danesh Jaffari is being sacked because of the skyrocketing inflation or because of his opposition to the president’s economic policies,” he wrote.

Mr. Ahmadinejad has defended his right to choose cabinet ministers on his personal blog, which he updates periodically. In an entry this week, without identifying any minister by name, he wrote that his cabinet choices reflected his policies for progress and development of the country.