Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr.20
By Fatih Karimov - Trend:
Iranian Vice President Es'haq Jahangiri has criticized the policies of the former administration in offering loans to small businesses.
The hasty decision of the former administration in paying loans to small businesses has led to 800 trillion rials (about $30 billion) bad loans, Iran's Mehr news agency reported on April 20.
The government will move toward downsizing, transferring state shares to the private sector and paving the way for large investments in order to create more jobs, he said.
Jahangiri went on to add that the unemployment rate has reached a critical level in the country. Some 700 million rials should be spent to create a single job, according to the vice president.
Iran may face 11 million jobless by the calendar year 1400 (March 2024-March 2025) if the same economic patterns of the past decades are followed.
Iranian interior minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli warned that the number of unemployed people will be multiplied by the Iranian year 1400, Iran's Mehr news agency reported on April 14.
He put the country's unemployment rate at 14 percent.
The high unemployment rate among Iranian university graduates is the main concern for the Iranian administration.
Ali Rabiei, the minister of labor and social affairs earlier said the administration is planning to curb the high jobless rate.
Rabiei added that although each Iranian employee one receives ten million rials (about $390) as average monthly salary, however if the inflation rate goes higher, creating more jobs will not be economically justified.
Some 2.5 million people are jobless in the country, and around 1.4 million of them are university graduates, according to the latest reports of the Statistical Center of Iran.
The Statistical Center of Iran reported on January 5 that the country's unemployment rate stood at 10.3 percent in the third quarter of the current calendar year, which started on March 21, the ISNA News Agency reported.
The figure shows 0.1 percent decrease compared to the same period of time the previous year.
The report put the country's jobless population during the three-month period at over 2.4 million.
The country's unemployment rate in urban and rural areas stood at 11.7 and 6.9 percent, respectively, in the mentioned period.