He appoints the council of ministers who implement the decisions of the RCC and the president. The legislative body of Iraq is the National Assembly, a 250-member unicameral assembly directly elected by 56 constituencies. The last legislative elections were held in March 1995, Iraq's first legislative election since 1988. Only 220 seats on the assembly were contested as the three Kurdish-controlled governorates were excluded from voting. The only legal political party is the Baath Party.
Iraqi law is based on Islamic law in special religious courts and civil law elsewhere.
The Iraqi economy is extremely centralized in the planning and management of industrial production and foreign trade while some small-scale industry, services, and agriculture are left to the private sector. All other areas of the economy were dwarfed by the concentration on the oil sector by the government. In the 1980s, financial difficulties caused by massive spending during the eight-year war with its neighbor Iran and by the destruction of some of Iraq's oil facilities, led the government to borrow heavily, implement austerity measures, and later reschedule foreign debt payments. After the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, oil exports rose with the construction of new pipelines and the restoration of the heavily damaged oil facilities. Labor shortages, salinization, and dislocations caused by previous land reforms and collectivization programs, hampered further development of the agriculture sector.