The Statistics Center of Iran, CSI, says that the number of employed Iranians older than 15 in the summer of 2020 numbered just over 23.5 million people, approximately 1.2 million less than the same period in 2019.
Despite the significant decline in the country's working population, Iran's unemployment rate has not only not increased but dropped by 1 percent, reaching 9.5 percent.
Earlier, the Iranian parliament Majlis' Research Center reported that many job seekers had quit their efforts because they failed to find a job.
Therefore, although the country's working population has fallen sharply, the unemployment rate, which is related to the number of active people, has decreased.
According to the SCI, the economic participation rate in the summer of 2020 decreased by 3.2 percent compared with the same season last year.
The report, published on the government's website on Wednesday, October 7, said that in the summer of 2019, 41.8 percent of the population aged 15 and over were economically active. They were counted as employed or unemployed people seeking a job.
Thus, more than 58 percent of the working-age population in Iran do not seek employment at all. Iranian authorities calculate the unemployment rate by the number of people actively looking for jobs as a percentage of the labor force. Therefore those who stop looking for jobs have no impact on the unemployment rate.
The unemployment rate for young people between the ages of 15 and 24 indicates that 23.1 percent of active individuals in that category were unemployed last summer. An examination of the unemployment rate in the age group of 18 to 35 years old also shows that 16.9 percent of the active population in this group was unemployed.
