February 2, 2024

The Statistical Center of Iran has announced that the unemployment rate has plummeted to the lowest in many years, a stunning development given how poor the economy is overall.

     But the London-based Iran International says the new and glowing unemployment figure was the result of statistical legerdemain.

     It says the new unemployment rate was generated only because the Statistical Center said that many people previously listed as unemployed had given up looking for jobs and were no longer counted as part of the labor force.

     The unemployment rate is the percentage of people working or looking for work who do not have a job.  If someone is not looking for work, he or she is not included in the base from which the unemployment rate is calculated.

     The Statistical Center recently said the unemployment rate dropped to just 7.6 percent in the fall of 2023 from 10.6 percent in the same season in 2019.  The unemployment rate has not been that low in many years.

     Iran International said it looked at the published details and found that 3.6 million people who were seeking jobs but did not have them in 2019 were no longer seeking jobs in 2023.  Thus, they were not counted as unemployed, accounting for the dramatic drop in the unemployment rate.  The cause for the rate’s decline was not the creation of new jobs in the Iranian economy, just a statistical fluke.

     Iran International did not say the Statistical Center had lied about the number of people seeking work.  It accepted that many people, frustrated by their inability to find work, had told the Statistical Center’s researchers that they had given up even looking for a job.  But that did not mean they had ceased to want a job.

     The Statistical Center said that in the fall of 2019, 44.3 percent of everyone aged 15 or older was in the labor force that is, either working or seeking work.  But in the fall of 2023, it said only 41.5 percent of the people in that age group were working or seeking work.

     Iran International said that meant 3.6 million Iranians had stopped looking for a job.  It said if they had stayed in the labor force, the unemployment rate would be an astounding 18 percent.

     It should also be noted that Iran counts as employed many people who only work half-time or less.

     Where once the ranks of the unemployed were comprised largely of the unskilled, in recent years many college graduates have not been able to find jobs.  The latest figures show that 43 percent of the unemployed seeking jobs are college graduates. That has raised questions among many graduating high school seniors about the utility of a college education. Also, many have criticized the regime for expanding higher education and encouraging so many people to attend university while not providing positions for them.

     Another issue is the regime effort to discourage women from working. The latest report showed that only 11.4 percent of Iranian women 15 or older are working—one of the lowest figures in the world.  Even in Saudi Arabia, which actively discouraged woman from working until the last few years, 29 percent of women now work. What’s more, 40 percent of working women in Iran work as clerks in shops owned by relatives or work on family farms and do not earn wages.