The Centre for Development and Employment Research (CDER) is a new think-tank that has started its journey. In collaboration with the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS), the centre kicked off recently with a presentation on 'Dynamics of Labour Market and Employment in Bangladesh'. It will conduct 'Employment and Labour Market Watch' to review job situation regularly as Education Watch does in case of education.
There were two presentations. One of them was by Dr Rizwanul Islam, who had served in the ILO for several years and the other by Dr. Rushidan Islam Rahman, Executive Chairperson of the Centre. Rizwan argued that high economic growth is necessary but not sufficient for employment growth. The most recent Bangladesh experience is possibly a clear pointer to such a development where growth has been satisfactory but employment effect of growth is not up to the mark. It is thus not growth per se but the nature or process of growth that determines employment. Second, open unemployment cannot be considered an appropriate indicator for the labour market situation in Bangladesh. In a country where there is no unemployment benefit, people cannot afford to be unemployed, even engaged in works where marginal productivity is zero. Under-employment masks actual unemployment level. Therefore, Bangladesh needs to develop alternative indicators.
Dr Rushidan's findings are related to youth unemployment in the country, seemingly correlated with demographic dividend. It needs no mention that the future of the Bangladesh economy hinges on labour productivity of this young labour force. Besides, Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) is related to quality employment. We need to get a better idea about the labour market especially of youth labour market situation. Herself a devoted researcher for a long time in the field of employment and labour market, she statistically depicted an in-depth scenario of the youth labour force (15-29 years) in the country. This size of this group of population has grown from 39 million to 43 million between 2010 and 2013. Labour force in this age group increased from 21 million to 23 million during the same period of time, possibly indicating a positive growth of the potential demographic dividend. However, there has been a little change in labour force participation rate (LFPR) of this segment; most of the increase owed to growth of the size of population. In fact, LFPR for males decreased slightly while that of females rose by a few percentage points.
Rushidan Islam provided us with two horrifying observations about youth population: first, one-fourths of the country's 43 million youths - compared to one-thirds in 2010 - is reported to be neither in education nor in labour force with males outpacing females. Call it 'missing youth' and consider that a huge number of the youth population tend to remain unutilised. (One might it also call it 'dead-weight losses' for the society). Second, the unemployment rate of graduates and above has gone up from 10 per cent to 16 per cent during the comparable periods while those with SSC and HSC has fallen from one-thirds to one-fifths between 2010 and 2013. Third, in 2010, about 30 per cent of employed youth had no education that drastically went down to 11 per cent in 2013. Most remarkably, the share of employed youth with SSC and HSC went up from roughly 10 per cent to 51 per cent. In other words, most of the employed youth are possibly employed in low productive jobs at home or migrated to low-paying jobs abroad.
The existing nexus between education and employment of youth population also invites a question: is it that our stage of development, as it is now, that has generated more demand for this type of educated labour? Supposedly there is a link between general and vocational training in the way of vicious cycle of low quality training and low income. For example, failure to perform well in schools leads to poor quality training that fetches poor quality jobs and low income. So this leads to the following policy suggestions: (a) without increased SSC/HSC completion, vocational training may not succeed in objective; (b) quality of vocational training and general education is related, and (c) quality of general education can reduce dropout. Citing the Labour Force Survey (2013) results, the researcher shows that the highest share of the recipients of training (one-thirds) belong to BA+ other groups indicating perhaps that the quality of tertiary education fails to offer employment. The danger is that low quality of such training combined with skill mismatch could worsen the unemployment situation.
To properly utilise young labour force, what we need to do are the following: (a) a balanced improvement of quality of general education along with demand-oriented technical and vocational education is urgently needed, and (b) quality improvement is crucial to reduce skill mismatch/gap. Training must be linked to opportunities for self-employment and regular paid employment, (c) woman component should gradually raised to 50 per cent of trainees even in 'high-skilled' occupations.
By and large, reaping home a demographic dividend under business-as-usual scenario seems to be a forlorn hope. The danger of failure in employing the youth could result in disaster from the point of social stability. It is thus urgently required that we revisit the whole gamut of growth and adopt employment-intensive economic activities through orchestrating appropriate polices. Admittedly, jobs have been created but we need to set our eyes on good jobs. This is a function of quality education and training. And Employment and Labour Market Watch could help monitor the indicators.
The writer, a former Professor of Economics at Jahangirnagar University, is Chair, Department of Economics and Social Science (ESS) BRAC University. [email protected]
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