In the latest meeting of Iran’s Supreme Employment Council, the main resolution that was approved was the creation of 1.85 million new jobs until the spring of 2023.
This resolution is facing skepticism in the government because many government economists say that the government does not have the opportunities for such a decision according to the country’s economic situation.
One thing adding to this skepticism is that over the past two years because of the expansion of the coronavirus, while Iran is one of the worst-hit countries in the world, according to the government’s statistics more than two million jobs have been lost.
Over the past decade, about 54 percent of the jobs in the country belong to the service sector, and this sector was the worst hit because of the coronavirus. The tourism and service sectors are not working properly, and most of the stores and supermarkets are facing lower visits because of the coronavirus protocols. Thus, most of the jobs that have been lost belong to the service sector.
Not having an acceptable vaccine outcome, this situation is getting worse without any progress, while many of Iran’s healthcare officials are warning the government about the sixth peak of the coronavirus pandemic.
Analysts expect some of these jobs to start again if the coronavirus crisis ends, but this has nothing to do with the government’s claim about the creation of about 2 million jobs, and it is strange but not unexpected from Iran’s government to use these numbers for its success of the creation of 2 million jobs.
The government is not able to create 2 million jobs, because they do not have the facilities, equipment, tools, and fields, and space in the country, according to Hamid Haj Esmaili, a market expert.
The reason for this is clear: in the tenth government, they tried it without any success. Therefore, they cannot claim that the previous government has created even one million jobs each year, to use it as an indicator for the success of the new government, and over the past decade, this did not happen in Iran at all.
The calculation about jobs created and lost shows exactly that the government was not able to create even one million jobs. In addition, the increasing number of people under the poverty line and the migration are other indicators of this reality.
The other question is with which capital will the government realize this. This is while the country is facing a huge budget deficit, and in the budget of this year nothing has been considered as the fund for job creation, and most of the budget’s destinations are not clear.
Accordingly, there is no budget to be invested in construction work, nor any investment to create employment.
The second important subject that should be considered for job creation is foreign investment. For a country like Iran, this reality is undeniable that without foreign investment they are not able to create jobs. Due to the regime’s policies, this is impossible in the coming decade.
The sanctions and the regime’s refusal to accept the condition of the FATF have made international money transfer for the regime impossible, therefore no one can make any investment in the country’s economy. Something that could be used but is not possible too is the use of the country’s private sector because in Iran there is no real private sector, and the only thing that exists is the so-called ‘government-run private sector,’ which is not in favor of the country’s economic interests.
The other two subjects that are making such a thing impossible are the imbalance of the banks which is one of the causes of the increasing inflation and the liquidity which has reached an unbelievable number. Something that is happening due to the regime’s wrong economic policies and a brokerage system that has created uncontrollable corruption.
