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Iran’s Recession and Unemployment to Stay

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NCRI – According to former head of Tehran Economics University, the real unemployment rate is several times higher than officially announced and it’s not going to decrease in the near future. Earlier, regime’s labor minister had also announced that the country’s unemployment rate would not decrease in the next few years.

Earlier this year, regime’s Statistics Center announced in its detailed 2016 job market report that the country’s number of unemployed were three millions.

Meanwhile, some of regime’s own economic experts believe that the figure is not real, saying that with hidden unemployment as well as university graduates taken into account, the number of country’s unemployed will reach 15 million.

“Recession and unemployment will continue, and I don’t think they’ll be resolved over the next four years”, says Abbasali Abunouri, referred to as economist and former head of Tehran Economics University, in his interview with state-run Nasim-Online news agency on Thursday June 15.

According to regime’s Statistics Center, a little more than ten percent of Iranian workers were underemployed last year, with some experts referring to this group as well as the graduates ready to enter the job market as the country’s hidden unemployed.

Underemployment includes, among others, those whose weekly working hours are less than that set by labor law, those who are out of work due to a slowdown in their working place’s activities, or those who are in a non-working season due to their type of job.

Meanwhile, regime’s presidential website has quoted Hassan Rouhani as saying earlier this year “instead of creating jobs for our youth, they opened universities’ doors to send them in, so that we now have five million university students, of whom 800 thousand graduate each year and enter the job market.”

To be added to that figure, are also the numbers of job seekers without a university degree as well as last years’ accumulated unemployed. Considering this, at least one million two hundred thousand enter Iran’s job market each year.

Getting out of recession and creating economic growth are the main prerequisites of creating sustainable employment. Meanwhile, the construction sector, which as a driving force for many other sectors plays an important role in this regard, is still in recession.

“A high integration density in housing sector has made it impossible for this sector to get out of recession in short term”, says Abbasali Abunouri, adding “so, my prediction is that the housing sector will continue to be in deep recession.”

A continued unemployment crisis in twelfth government was also previously confirmed by some government officials, including Ali Rabiei, regime’s Minisiter of Labor and Social Affairs. Pointing to government’s plan for to creating one million jobs in 2017, Rabiei had said a while ago that ”if the rate of job creation over the next 4-5 years remains at its current level, unemployment rate will remain the same as well.”

With one million two hundred job seekers entering the market every year, the unemployment rate is going to increase by the end of this year unless Rouhani succeeds to create one million jobs.

According to regime’s Statistics Center, 615,000 jobs were created last year while the unemployment rate has reached from 11 percent at the end of last year to 12.4 percent early this year.

In an interview with Fararoo news website on June 14, economic expert ‘Ali Dini-Torkamani’ pointed to “the wrong, nested structure of entities, and high number of power centers” as Rouhani’s most important problem in economy, saying that with their high decision-making power, “the centers put the government in trouble sometimes with their decisions.”

Most of such entities, like the Revolutionary Guards, are operating under Iranian regime leader Ali Khamenei, while despite their use of public funds they neither pay taxes nor are their activities being effectively monitored.