President Hassan Rouhani has called for concerted efforts to reduce the country’s unemployment rate to a single digit by the end of his tenure (mid-2017), says Deputy Labor Minister Isa Mansouri. Referring to the gap between the number of skilled workers and industrial needs as the main hurdle in the way of job creation, Mansouri said, “There are regions where skilled workers are fewer than 10% of their industries’ labor requirements,” Mehr News Agency reported. According to the latest report of the Statistical Center of Iran, the unemployment rate stood at 11% in the last Iranian year (ended March 19, 2016). The number registers a 0.4% rise compared with the preceding year, meaning 2.72 million Iranians were out of job last year.
