Measurement and Analysis of Regional Labor Market Inequalities in the 4th Development Plan

Regional development, regional policies execution and decreasing imbalances have always been the challenges of governments during the last two decades. One could refer to the inequalities of labor markets among different regions of the country in the development plans performance. One of the goals of the 4th development plan (2005 - 2009) was to decrease the difference between the highest and lowest rate of unemployment among the provinces to 5.5 percent in the end of the plan. This research tries to survey and precisely measure the changes of regional inequalities between two outstanding indicators of labor market, i.e. unemployment rate and labor participation rates, in 30 provinces of Iran within the 4th development plan, using regional inequality measures. The results show that according to official statistics, the gap between the highest and lowest unemployment rates among provinces in the end of the plan was 12.6 percent while that of the labor participation rates was 16.2 percent. Taking the inequality indicators into consideration, it should be mentioned that unemployment rate inequality among the regions have relatively decreased, but contrary to expectations, labor participation rate has increased. Meanwhile in the 4th development plan, inequalities trend of two regionally important indicators of labor market has been the reverse of national level.