Rural-Urban Employment Disparity in West Azarbaijan Province during Three Decades of 1966-96

Disparity is raised as a key feature of third world countries. Decreasing disparity is thus considered as one of the development objectives in such countries. Disparity dimensions are a matter of discussion in various economic, social, political, and cultural spheres. It is of a particular importance to create job opportunities for reasons of its absolute contribution towards reducing poverty and inequality. As study results indicate, creating job opportunities was tended toward the urban regions during the 1966-96 period. Such an employment disparity was reduced over the post-revolution period. Maximum gap in the increased job opportunities occurred over 1976-1986 period, indicating not only no increase in the number of rural employees but also a decreased number of rural jobs. During the whole study period, the urban population share increased and the rural population share decreased. In all sections over the concerned period, the increase in urban population was higher than that of the rural population, so that both the whole population increase in the province occurred in the urban areas and the considerable decrease occurred in the rural population. According to theoretical bases and experimental observations, these developments were mainly caused by tendencies of creating job opportunities towards the urban areas. Concentration of investments in the urban regions and thereby generation of employments in cities caused population to make their major movements to the cities, producing in turn population density in the cities of the province. With respect to the employment contribution to reduce economic, social, and political disparities in the rural/urban regions of the province, a balanced expansion of the job opportunities between both regions is viewed as a necessary measure.