Business | Economy
Generation in search of jobs
Iran has hundreds of thousands of unemployed and unhappy youth.
- By Anna Fifield, Financial Times
- Published: 01:39 February 2, 2008
Merhnaz thought her expensive, private university degree in economics would be her ticket to a solid job. Instead, like hundreds of thousands of other young Iranians, she finds herself unemployed and unhappy.
"I've been looking for a job since graduation," says the 25-year-old who finished university two years ago. "I took tests to enter government banks but I didn't succeed and I applied at the Tehran city council but they weren't hiring."
Merhnaz, who says most of her university friends are unemployed, is waiting to find out if she was successful in her application to be a teacher at a private English language institute. "I want to have a job - I'd really like to work - so naturally it's not very pleasant not to be able to find one," she says.
Her situation is all too common in Iran, where more than two-thirds of the population is aged under 30 and where 750,000 people enter the labour market each year.
When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president in 2005, one of his key pledges was to tackle the unemployment problem. Among his policies, Ahmadinejad has encouraged short-term job creation and government-subsidised bank loans for regional infrastructure projects. But reformists and even his fellow conservatives have criticised the president's efforts to remedy the problem - and his management of the economy in general, accusing the government of lacking "financial discipline".
Economy
The economy, and the high rates of unemployment and inflation in particular, will be at the forefront of voters' minds in the March parliamentary elections.
Official statistics suggest that the unemployment rate is about 10 per cent, broadly the same as when the president took office. Local analysts, however, say the government has embarked on "data management" and suggest the real rate is much higher.
A poll by Iran Economics, a leading business monthly, found the median forecast among 12 econ-omists, some of them working in government, was 14.5 per cent. But the rate is even worse when the number of underemployed people is taken into account. Some econ-omists suggest that as much as a quarter of Iran's 21 million-strong population eligible for work is either unemployed or underemployed.
"Because of the big youth population there has been a tendency to hire extra personnel, so most of the government offices and state-owned companies are over-staffed," says Heydar Pourian, editor of Iran Economics. "When you go to a government office you can see people with PhDs sitting around doing nothing."
In Tehran it seems that almost everyone who does not have a job becomes a taxi driver.
Mohammad bought a car so that his son, who has struggled to find a job since finishing school, could work as a taxi driver. He was still paying the instalments on that car when he realised, after retiring from his job in a government ministry, that he needed to drive too.
"My daughter is now 23 but I can't afford the 60 million Iranian rials ($6,400) it will cost for her to get married," he says, adding that his daughter cannot contribute because there are no suitable jobs for her either.
"There are not enough jobs out there for young people," says Mohammad. "A young man can get a job if he has a wealthy father because his father can invest in a business for him. But otherwise there is nothing but being a taxi driver or day labourer."
Every morning the squares of Tehran fill up with construction workers, all hoping to be picked up for a day's work.
The situation is even worse outside the capital, economists say, where there is less demand for skilled work. Much of the unskilled work in the countryside is done for a pittance by Afghan immigrants.
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