Published in The Financial Express on Saturday, 21 March 2015.
Jobless rate of youths rises to 8.1pc
Jasim Uddin Haroon
The rate of jobless young people recorded a marginal rise over a period of three years to reach 8.1 per cent of the total in 2013. A slew of factors that include shrinkage of spaces in the slow-going economy are responsible for the growth of unemployment.
By official count this figure of unemployed youths accounts for nearly double the country’s overall unemployed population.
The findings came from the latest survey on the country’s labour force, concluded in 2013. The statistics are expected to be disclosed sometime next month.
The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), the country’s national statistical organisation, conducted the survey on the job situation.
The unemployment rate of the youth, aged between 15 and 29, was 7.5 per cent in the previous survey done in 2010.
The total youth labour force accounts for 22.7 million.
On the other hand, the jobless youths constitute around 70 per cent of the total unemployed people available in the economy.
According to the latest labour-force survey, the overall unemployment rate has dropped marginally to 4.3 per cent until 2013. It shows nearly 2.6 million of the total workforce as unemployed.
The rate of unemployment was 4.5 per cent in 2010.
The number of people left at loose ends for lack of employment opportunity in the age group of 15-29 now stood at 1.85 million, out of the nearly 2.6 million total unemployed.
Economists who work on the labour-force situation told the Financial Express (FE) cited a slew of obstructions facing absorption of the growing youth population in the mainstream economic activities.
Some of them find lack of adequate spaces for job creation for the youth population.
A cardinal one they identified is the existing education system that does not match, in most cases, with the requirements of the employers.
Dr Zahid Hussain, lead economist at the Dhaka office of the World Bank (WB), told the FE that overall education has some problems to fit in the needs of the job market.
“There are a number of certificates in the hand of youths but they have problems as to how to write a single sentence properly,” Dr Hussain said.
The WB economist, however, said the youths have their abilities to quickly learn while they are on the job.
“But most of the employers don’t take risks for such type of educated youth,” Dr Hussain noted. He said political turbulence frustrates the entrepreneurs away from expanding their businesses, thus leading to squeezes of new job opportunities in the economy.
Dr AK Enamul Haque, a professor of Economics at the East West University, said the government should create new job opportunities for the educated youths.
He said: “Government has prepared educational curriculum, so if the education is not matched with the jobs, the youths cannot be victim of that circumstances.”
Dr Haque, however, pins his hope on a reduction of the growth of such young-age population in the years to come as the birth rate has been on a downturn since the 1990s.
Mr Haque, also a director at the Dhaka-based Economic Research Group, said among the young population, the urban youths are major stakes in the unemployment as they want jobs with adequate remunerations.
Towfiqul Islam Khan, research fellow at the country’s private think-tank Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), said Bangladesh now needs to prepare strategies on how to absorb the growing number of youth.
He says the number of youths will increase for more years and then take a downturn.
“We need technical education to meet the market demand of jobs.”
Mr Khan said Bangladesh simultaneously should explore new overseas labour market to reduce the size of youth population in the country.
However, the BBS conducted the survey called labour force survey 2013 on extensive and representative samples numbering 36,000 across country.
In the survey, the number of employed in the economy stood at 58 million, with the creation of 4.0 million new jobs in three years till 2013 from 2010.
In the meantime, a report of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) forecast the global youth unemployment will grow over the next five years to 2018.
It will put a generation at risk of lasting damage to their earnings potential and job prospects throughout their lives, according to the ILO’s Global Employment Trends for Youth 2013 report.
The UN agency expected the worldwide youth jobless rate to increase from 12.4 per cent last year to 12.8 per cent by 2018.
Jasimharoon@yahoo.com