By the help of investments made by both the government and the private sector, 400,000 jobseekers were employed in the first six months of the current Iranian year (March-21-September 22), Mohammad-Baqer Nobakht, President Rouhani's adviser for supervision and strategic affairs announced in a TV interview on Sunday.
The number of unemployed people, which had reached 2.5 million in spring (March 21-June 20), declined to 2.2 million by the end of summer (June 21-September 22), Nobakht said.
Unemployment dropped to 9.5 percent in the second quarter (summer) from 10.7 percent in spring, the Statistical Center of Iran reported last week. Accordingly, the unemployment rate fell 0.9 percent compared with the summer of 2013. Accounting for 5.1 percent of the total unemployed labor force, the capital Tehran registered the lowest rate of unemployment and the northeastern province of North Khorasan recorded the highest rate with 16.2 percent.
"Authentic" Job Data
Emphasizing the authenticity of the official unemployment rate for the summer, Nobakht asserted that according to the International Labor Organization (ILO), a country's unemployment rate is calculated as a percentage by dividing the number of unemployed individuals by the total number of individuals currently included in the labor force.
"Every three months, a census of 64,000 of households is carried out and the latest census carried out during the summer revealed that we have 2.25 million people unemployed. So, dividing the number by the total number of employed people (23.75 million) gave us the unemployment rate of 9.5 percent," he said.
Elsewhere, Nobakht underlined the administration's continuous efforts to curb the inflation and the unemployment rates, and described the single-digit unemployment rate achieved in the summer was a real success.
In the first half of the current year, the administration mainly tried to attract investors to gather as much finances as it could to complement the semi-finished development projects in a bid to improve the economic situation, he said. "In the first six months, 108 trillion rials (more than $4 billion) was allocated to development projects, which accounts for 52 percent of the ratified credits in the current year's budget."
"In addition, 1,130 trillion rials (more than $42 million) has been allocated to secure the venture capital for a large number of production units."
Nobakht vowed that the semi-finished projects will be completed by the end of the current year (March 20, 2015).
Since President Rouhani took office over a year ago, the national economy has been facing stagnation, exacerbated by a high inflation rate, lack of cash flow and industrial investment, rise in imports of non-primary goods, and the continuation of US-led sanctions and their impact on various sectors of the Iranian economy. The combination of these has also resulted in problems in the job market. The government has made it clear that resolving the unemployment crisis will require structural economic reform as well as patience.
Based on statistics provided by the Central Bank of Iran (CBI), the unemployment rate increased to 10.7% in the second quarter of the current Iranian year (June 23-August 22) from 10.5% in the first quarter (March 21-June 22). Unemployment rate in the country averaged 11.76% from 2001 until 2014, reaching an all time high of 14.7% in the first quarter of 2002 and a record low of 9.5% in the fourth quarter of 2008.
