The government set the goal of creating 2.5 million jobs annually to provide positions for all those leaving school each year and to reduce the unemployment rate to single digits.
But Deputy Labor Minister Hossain Foruzan-Mehr told the Mehr news agency in an interview that only 1.2 million jobs were created in the first 10 months of the current Persian year.
That is only 58 percent of the target for those 10 months.
But the deputy minister still claimed that the unemployment rate had been reduced by 2.5 percentage points since last summer despite the poor job-creation figures.
Foruzan-Mehr did not explain why he thought the govern-ment’s job-creation efforts had fallen so short of the goals.
