Contradictory statistics on youth employment have been published by official sources recently.
The Statistical Center of Iran put the percentage of young people between the ages of 15 and 24 who are neither in employment, education, nor training (NEET, for short) at 29.4%, but according to figures published by the Ministry of Cooperatives, Labor and Social Welfare, their share stands at 77.4%.
NEET statistics are especially important because they show a clear picture of the future trend. Young people are the most valuable assets of all societies; a country whose young people are idle, neither receive education nor learn a skill or get engaged in healthy economic activity, cannot have a future.
This was stated by Nasser Zakeri, an economist, in a write-up for the Persian daily Shargh. A translation of the text follows:
Stark contradiction in official statistics is noteworthy. If we accept that the first step toward solving a problem is identifying the problem and understanding it completely, then we must say that the contradiction in statistics shows that the people in charge do not have a comprehensive understanding of the importance of the issue and the necessity of finding a solution for it.
Secondly, the way the society deals with this valuable asset, i.e., the youth is not different from the way it has used other valuable assets. Just as we have destroyed the underground water resources, polluted the environment and missed development opportunities, we don't appreciate the youth, this most valuable human capital of the society; we don’t plan to make optimal use of their potential.
Even if we accept the statistics published by SCI, which puts the percentage of NEET at 29.4%, only 26 countries, which are mostly among poor African countries, have a worse situation than Iran. But if we believe in the statistics released by the Cooperatives Ministry, no country, not even the poorest country in the world, has performed worse than Iran.
You might say that the ministry’s statistics are not accurate, but as mentioned above, even accepting this claim does not solve the problem; our country still has very unfavorable conditions even when we assume that the SCI data are accurate.
We need to be sensitive about the quality of education and training. Do young people between 15 and 24 years old, who are studying or learning skills or are in employment, enjoy favorable conditions? Do they receive good educational services and get ready to work in the near future? Are the working youth really in the service of the country’s production sector? Are they assigned to useful and productive jobs? If so, are there any figures on their efficiency as a workforce?
In other words, if in a developed and productive society, only 10% of young people were categorized as NEET, and in an undeveloped society, 50% of youth were classified as NEET, the two figures cannot be simply compared because 90% of the youth who are studying or learning skills or working in the first society receive better quality educational services or acquire more useful skills.
If they were employed, they would serve the national production much better than the second society. On the one hand, our society has engaged a small number of its youth in educational programs and productive activities, and on the other hand, it provides these programs inefficiently.
Note that the average annual growth rate of labor productivity in Iran failed to reach 1% between 1966 and 2016. The increase in NEET in our society marks a grave social crisis. In fact, incorrect and unhealthy social relations, which contributed to the rapid growth of this index, have turn this great opportunity for the growth and development of society into an alarming threat; with an increase in the percentage of NEET, social ills proliferate.
Violence, delinquency, despair and addiction are the first fallouts of this unfavorable situation; in the next stage, the society becomes prone to instability.
At present, reducing this index to a single digit is even more important than curbing the galloping inflation.
