Bangladesh would see new entrants in its labour market to have peaked at 3.1m by 2020 and would face, like other poorest nations, a major challenge of providing them with sustainable jobs, said a new UNCTAD report.
It urged the nations to act decisively to upgrade national infrastructure, greatly expand credit, improve education, and especially unleash the potential of domestic firms and entrepreneurs, so the jobs are created.
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) released the report in Geneva, Switzerland on Wednesday.
Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), a civil society think tank, presented the report at a press briefing in Dhaka.
The report says the number of younger people of working age in 49 least developed countries (LDCs) is increasing by 16m per year, and in each one of the 11 such countries it would climb by at least half a million annually.
About Bangladesh it says the country had 2.9m new entrants in 2005 and the figure will peak at 3.1m by 2020, and decline thereafter.
The report cautions that while LDCs enjoyed relatively high growth in gross domestic product (GDP) during 2002-2008, the economic progress did not translate into correspondingly increasing levels of employment.
Indeed, the countries with faster GDP growth had relatively lower employment creation.
In 2000-2012 period, LDC employment growth was 2.9% per annum – a rate slightly above the population growth rate of 2.3%, but well below LDC’s average GDP growth of 7%.
The report subtitled “Growth with Employment for Sustainable Development” views that demographic trends in the LDCs are such that millions of new jobs will have to be created every year over the coming decades.
During the rest of the current decade, the poorest countries would have to create around 95m jobs to absorb new entrants to the labour market, and another 160m in the 2020s.
If this employment challenge is not met, the world risks being confronted with growing poverty in LDCs, social unrest, and mass international emigration, the report contends.
It says the economic policies pursued by most LDCs and their development partners to date have focused on macroeconomic stability, economic efficiency, and liberalisation.
But the approach has failed to generate jobs in the quantity and quality needed by LDCs’ increasing populations.
Job creation was disappointing even those “boom” years from 2002 to 2008, when the LDCs enjoyed an average growth of 8%.
The report stresses that the LDCs need to enact a new generation of policies to foster the development of productive capacities in such a way as to obtain “job-rich” growth.
It notes vulnerable employment jobs without formal arrangements, decent working conditions, and adequate social security still accounts for about 80% of total employment in LDCs.
The report says the globes poorest countries should take steps to improve GDP growth via the generation of decent employment and investment to develop productive capacities.
UNCTAD points out that the LDC population is not only growing rapidly, but is quickly urbanising.
This combination of factors makes the current decade critical for rectifying the employment situation in LDCs.
A major problem with the current process of structural change is that it cannot provide the surplus population released from agriculture with productive employment elsewhere, the report notes.
CPD Research Director Dr Fahmida Khatun and Additional Research Director Dr Khondaker Golam Moazzem spoke at the press briefing.
They, however, said the recurring political turmoil after every five years in Bangladesh would cast a long-term impact on the country’s economy.
Such recurrence of political instability would weaken the country’s economic foundation and pose a threat to achieve sustainable growth, they added.