Any country that seeks to possess comprehensive wealth and improve development must consider both short and long-term economic and social programs, with the population, structure, and dynamism playing a key role in helping to reach these goals.
At the beginning of the 1990s, the Iranian regime implemented the wrong population plan, which, in turn, harmed the demographic structure of Iran and rapidly changed the structure of the age classes of the population. Now, many of the regime’s social experts have stated that this will have devastating consequences for Iran in the future.
The majority of Iran’s population has reached working age, but the regime cannot use this population. An index called NEET is one of the main indicators to show the inability to effectively use the working population.
The term NEET, which was first introduced officially in 1999 at the British political level, was proposed and adopted by most developed countries and some developing countries in less than ten years.
This index, which is the abbreviation of ‘Not in Employment, Education or Training’, describes the situation of young people between the ages of 15 and 24 who are neither in education (have dropped out of education) nor are engaged in skill training, nor employed anywhere.
According to various studies in different countries, these young people are more prone to delinquency, drug addiction, and committing crimes; therefore, policymakers usually pay the most attention to providing the possibility of employment and skill training for this age group.
In Iran, however, the regime has left these people without any future by not creating any facilities to ease them into employment. As a result, most of them are victims of crimes and addiction, which of course, the regime promotes in the hope that they will repress a freedom-seeking generation.
While the NEET rate in developed countries is around 2-10%, this rate was close to 30% in Iran in 2018, which equates to a population of 3.1 million young people aged 15-24, according to the regime’s filtered statistics.
The fact that 30% of 15-24-year-old youths are not engaged in any activity, any skill training, or any job, is imposing heavy pressure on households and provides the ground for delinquency and social damage. This isn’t even the regime’s biggest concern, that title goes to the security threat faced by the regime because of Iran’s starving population.
If we look at the age of people who participated in the nationwide protests of January 2018 and November 2019, the majority were young people in the age group of NEETs (15-24-year-olds).
From December 2017 to the present date, the provinces of Golestan, Hormozgan, Kermanshah, Lorestan, West Azerbaijan, Khuzestan, Kurdistan, Hamadan, Bushehr, and Khorasan Razavi have the highest rate of NEET populations and have faced the most protests, mostly led by the youths.
The regime’s statistics of unemployed youths highlight that Iran has the highest NEET population after many African countries. Iran is ranked 27th in the world, and according to the statistical data of the regime’s Ministry of Labor and the data of the International Labor Organization (ILO), 29.7 percent of Iran’s 15-24-year-old youth in 2018 were among those classed as NEETs.
Out of the population of 10,467 million young people aged 15 to 24 in Iran in 2017, more than 3.1 million people were in the ranks of NEETs, while at the same time, this number in the EU was just 10 percent, covering a population of about half a billion people.
Since the NEET index is also extracted from the list of the country’s unemployed population, if statistics of the NEET rate are provided at the micro level, i.e., of the cities, this rate would be even higher. Also, the regime failed to provide any accurate statistics in the field of employment.
Wrong policies such as the lack of job opportunities, the mismatch of training with the labor market, the counter-productive structure of Iran’s economy, and inefficient education and training are among the most important reasons for such a situation.
Source » irannewsupdate