Tehran, Iran, October 22
By Mehdi Sepahvand – Trend:
While Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has named employment as one of the areas whose improvement he will specifically follow in his current administration, his vice president has become the target of harsh criticism over figures he represented of job creation.
First Vice President Es’haq Jahangiri this week claimed the government created 1.5 million jobs in the first half of the current fiscal year (March-September).
Critics did not hesitate to rebuff the claim, going so far as to force the head of Iran Statistics Center, Omid Ali Parsa, to state the official figures gathered by his respective organization.
Parsa said that the employment statistics of last spring season stood at about 700,000, while that of the summer about 795,000.
It seems here that a misinterpretation of technical terms has become the source of dispute. A source from the Ministry of Labor was unavailable to comment on this.
Following Jahangiri’s statements, MP Hossein Naqavi Hosseini, a political rival, said the government should explain where the money to create 1.5 million jobs has come from.
“Each job will take 100 million rials (each USD at 34,311 rials) to create. Jahangiri’s statement means 150 trillion rials money has been spent. Why is the Parliament unaware of such money?” the MP said.
Mehrdad Bouj Lahuti, another MP, said it is impossible to create 1.5 million jobs in six months “since in the first four months of this fiscal year, we had 25 percent increase in imports and 15 percent decrease in exports.”
“Also, it has been stated that with $770 billion investment, $65 billion of which should come from foreign resources, 1 million jobs can be created. This is while so far at most $15 billion foreign investment has been materialized,” Lahuti said.
Also, Morteza Afagheh, an economist, said no trace of 1.5 million new jobs can be seen in people’s lives right now, adding it is unlikely that 700,000 jobs were created during the summer.
Officials have been giving contradictory reports over unemployment in Iran. Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli last week said the rate reached 60 percent in some cities. Government spokesperson Mohammad Bagher Nobakht, however, denied that.
Iran’s unemployment rate this summer (June 21-Sept. 22) stood at 11.7 percent, according to the latest report from Iran Statistical Center.
All Iranians aged over 10 years, who worked at least one hour a week or temporarily left their work during the survey week, were included as employed labor force in this summer’s report by the Statistics Center.
In the last fiscal year, which ended March 20, the government created 650,000 jobs, while the desirable number was 1.3 million, Hamid Reza Haji Babaei, a member of the parliament and former minister of education, recently said.
