DHAKA: The recently released Labour Force Survey report of the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics shoes that over two million people constituting 4.3 per cent of the labour force of the country are unemployed and over 15.1 million people or 34.2 per cent of the labour force are under-employed with limited working opportunities.
Besides, the number of educated unemployed is 1.2 million which is 5.2 per cent of the 20.3 million ‘educated’ people. Of the educated unemployment, 9.5 per cent hold graduate and post-graduate degrees.
Interestingly, the findings of the BBS, a department operating under the Ministry of Planning, run counter to a recent government claim, that there is no unemployment problem in Bangladesh.
The Finance and Planning Minister of Bangladesh, M. Saifur Rahman, claimed in April that there was no unemployment problem in the country.
“No unemployment... in many cases, we have more than full employment,” the minister had reportedly told journalists when asked about measures likely to be taken in the next budget for employment generation during a pre-budget meeting in the last week of April.
However, the BBS survey, conducted in 2004 on the basis of data collected in 2003, reveals that unemployment has decreased in urban areas, while it has increased in rural areas of the country. The findings of the survey show that the size of the labour force has increased to 46.3 million in 2002-03, up 4.4 per cent from 40.7 million in 1999-2000. “Absolute unemployment has increased 17 per cent.”
The BBS survey considers a person employed or unemployed taking into account his/her current activity status with a reference period of seven days preceding the survey. Besides, the survey includes economically active population aged 15 and above, while people who worked 35 hours during the reference week are considered as fully employed, and those who worked for less than 35 hours are treated as under-employed. The persons incapable of any economic activity or full-time students are not considered labour force.
The survey comprises 1,000 primary sampling units each with 200 average households. However, some economists assert that the actual unemployment figures will be much higher than official statistics.
“The main problem lies in the government’s insistence that there is no unemployment in the country,” says Prof Muzaffer Ahmad.
“Frequent policy shift, prompted by intervention of multilateral lending agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, also retards growth of the gross domestic product and thus employment.”
Abdul Hye Mondal, a senior research fellow at the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, argues that ‘unemployment is understated’ in Bangladesh, thanks particularly to the definitional problem.
“A one-week reference period, which is the basis of the BBS survey of employment/unemployment, does not necessarily imply the person’s working status round the year,” argues Mondal, who specialises in industrial and labour economics. Mondal believes that the actual unemployment rate must be around 30-40 per cent.
He also believes that the government does not have any specific strategy to generate employment.
“The poverty reduction strategy paper stresses poverty reduction through increased GDP, but it does not set any specific goal about how and at what rate employment should be generated,” said Mondal. ”When you talk about seven to eight per cent growth, you should also mention the rate at which employment will be generated. Employment generation is directly linked with growth.”
However, the findings of the BBS survey further show that the employment opportunities for women have increased relatively during the period as female unemployment decreased to 4.9 per cent in 2003 from 7.8 per cent in 2000. The male unemployment, on the other hand, has increased to 4.2 per cent from 3.4 per cent.
Of the labour force, size of the male labour force is 30.6 million while that of the female is 10.3 million.
The number of educated unemployed persons, the survey says, is 1.2 million, which is 5.2 per cent of the 23.1 million educated persons. Among them the highest unemployment of 9.5 per cent is observed for those with an education of bachelor’s or above.
The rate of educated unemployment is higher in urban areas compared to rural areas because the percentage of educated persons is more in urban areas than in rural areas, the survey says.
