Relative Importance of Age Structure Changes in Changes in Unemployment Rate

This article seeks to present the importance of age structure changes in unemployment changes. Therefore, by drawing a picture of changes in unemployment in Iran, their impact on changes in age structure is examined. The data is derived from the 1965-2016 Iranian decennial general censuses of population and housing. An attempt has been made to analyze unemployment trends by gender for urban and rural areas using a cross-sectional approach. An examination of unemployment indicators showed an increase in unemployment of women and men in 2006 and 2016. The standardization of the proportion of unemployed people shows that similarity in age distribution and education distribution cannot remove their differences in unemployment in the years when unemployment has increased. This finding holds for women in the whole country and women and men in urban and rural, the only exception being men in the whole country. Therefore, recent changes in unemployment must be attributed to factors other than changes in age structure and education composition such as personal characteristics (marital status and professional skills) as well as managerial problems and the lack of relevance between people's skills and requirements of the labor market.