Summer Employment Report Mixed

The latest report by the Statistical Center of Iran for the second quarter of the current Iranian year (June 21-Sept. 20) shows a total of 23.8 million were employed compared to 23.4 million a year ago. The increase of 374,000 jobs is smaller than the size of the cohort of half a million new job seekers and, more importantly, falls short of the one million new jobs President Ebrahim Raisi had promised during his presidential campaign in 2021, economist Djavad Salehi Isfahani wrote in a new post published on his weblog. The full text follows:
The increase in total employment is somehow less disappointing if you consider that employment in industry and services rose by 685,000, which would have been closer to the one million jobs target, had agriculture not lost 300,000 jobs between summer 2021 and 2022. For the second quarter, services added more than half a million jobs and industry added another 122,000 jobs, which is not a stellar performance but much improved from the loss of 160,000 jobs over spring. Employment in agriculture was down in both the spring and summer quarters of this year.
The divergent experiences of agriculture and the other two sectors suggest that the loss of jobs in agriculture may be due to factors special to that sector, such as the decade-long drought. Clearly, the government cannot do much about it in the near future, but all previous governments are collectively responsible. Lack of regulation to control the extraction of underground water from common aquifers and subsidies to electricity and diesel fuel that run the water pumps that are rapidly depleting Iran’s precious aquifers are two of the principal culprits.
The recent protests make it unlikely that the government can do much about energy prices or hasten job growth any time soon. So, to reach the government’s target of two million new jobs by this summer, something must be done about easing restrictions on Iran’s external trade and the political crisis that has engulfed the country in the past two-and-a-half months.
Back to the employment report. The unemployment rate for the 15+ population was down by 0.7 percentage point to 8.9%, as a result of the slight increase in the number of people participating in the labor market. The unemployment rate of young workers (18-34 years old) fell further (by 1.4 percentage points) to 16.2%. These changes show that the economy was probably growing this summer, albeit slowly.
The unemployment rate for women also fell, though by less than that for men. Women’s unemployment rate is more than twice that of men – 17.2% vs. 7.3% in summer 2022. A similar ratio held for the age-group of 18-34 years, 29.3% for women vs. 13.1% for men.