Nearly 1.5 million people are employed in the cooperative sector, said ISNA quoted deputy minister of cooperatives, labor and social welfare, Hamid Kalantari as saying on Sunday. The government has allocated 5,500 billion rials ($159 million) in next year’s budget to stimulate the cooperatives sector, he added. “The funding will enable the cooperative sector to create jobs,” he said, noting that the cooperative sector’s share in the national economy must increase to 25%. Article 44 of the Constitution stipulates that the national economy falls into three categories of public, cooperative and private sectors. It explicitly underlines the role and significance of the cooperative sector when it says that public sector operations should be limited to a certain extent and that the private sector is complementary to the public and cooperative sectors.
