Iran's Q3 Employment Rate Reaches 39.6%

EghtesadOnline: The employment rate in the third quarter of the current Iranian year (Sept. 23-Dec. 21, 2019) was at 39.6% (24.44 million), up 0.4% compared with the same quarter of last year, the Statistical Center of Iran's latest report on Iran's job market shows.

News ID: ۷۴۹۷۰۱

16 February 2020

Employment is defined as persons of working age engaged in any activity to produce goods or provide services for pay or profit, whether at work during the reference period or not at work due to a temporary absence from a job, or to working-time arrangement, according to Financial Tribune.

In other words, employment rates are defined as a measure of the extent to which available labor resources (people available to work) are being used. They are calculated as the ratio of the employed to the working age population.

Employment rates are sensitive to the economic cycle, but in the longer term they are significantly affected by governments' higher education and income support policies and by policies that facilitate employment of women and disadvantaged groups.

Men and women employment rates in Q3 were put at 64.7% and 14.5% respectively; 19.97 million men and 4.46 million women were employed during the period.

The employment rate was 38.1% or 17.93 million in urban areas and 44.4% or 6.51 million in rural areas.

The share of employment of university graduates stood at 24.4% of the total employed population, of which employment among male and female graduates was 21.3% and 38.2%, respectively. Graduate employment rates in urban and rural areas stood at 30.4% and 7.8% of the total population of job-holders.

Q3 statistics show that 36.5% of the country’s labor force worked more than 49 hours of service per week, indicating no change over the same period of last year.

Iran’s unemployment rate, according to SCI, i.e. the proportion of jobless population of ages 15 years and above, stood at 10.6% in Q3, indicating a 1.2% decrease compared with the same period of last year.

A total of 2,892,726 Iranians were unemployed in Q3, the latest report by the Statistical Center of Iran shows.

Men’s unemployment stood at 8.9% while for women the rate hovered around 17.3%. Over 1.95 million men and 936,002 women of ages 15 and above were jobless in Q3.

The unemployment rate was 11.8% for urban areas (2.39 million people) and 7.1% for rural areas (494,277 people).

SCI provides two figures for the youth unemployment rate: the proportion of the population between the ages of 15 and 24 and those between the ages of 18 and 35.

The youth unemployment rate of those between 15 and 24 years stood at 25.8% in Q3, posting a 1.2% decrease while the unemployment rate of those between 18 and 35 years stood at 17.9%, posting a decline of 1.4% YOY.

The services sector employed 50% of the Iranian employed population (12.22 million), 0.1% more than the corresponding period of last year, whereas industrial and agricultural sectors provided 32.9% and 17.1% of jobs respectively.

Over 8.03 million were employed in industrial sector, indicating an increase of 0.1% compared with the year before and 4.19 million worked in the agriculture sector, posting a 0.1% decline YOY.