Staff Reporter :Bangladesh faces the challenge of providing jobs to more than 21 million people who will enter the country’s labour market in the next one decade.”One of the country’s greatest development challenges is to provide employment to the more than two million people, who will join the labour force each year over the next decade,” according to a report of World Bank (WB) titled “Toward New Sources of Competitiveness in Bangladesh.The report published recently also said that only 58.1 million of the country’s 103.3 million people are employed. Bangladesh needs to use its labour endowment even more intensively to increase growth and, in turn, absorb the additional labour.”Bangladesh’s ambition to accelerate its growth to become a middle-income country by 2021 will largely depend on high pace of poverty reduction, and share prosperity more widely among its citizens by creating jobs for the new labour force,” it said.The report suggests that Bangladesh can achieve a sustained high economic growth by full exploitation of the knowledge, resources and export markets and its labour force. “Bangladesh will need to exploit the international market more intensively to accelerate its export that has already played a key role in providing gainful employment,” it added. The report mentioned that Bangladesh’s exports have exhibited strong growth and doubled between 1995 and 2012, owing to success in garments, catering largely to the European Union and the United States. Since 2009, Bangladesh has become the world’s second largest garment exporter, making it unique among least developed countries (LDCs) in its high share of manufactures in total exports, which reached 90.5 per cent in 2013 compared with about 26.2 per cent for LDCs.Garment exports can continue to grow in existing and newer markets. Newer products will emerge more slowly. Thus, more rapid export growth will initially rely on capturing higher market shares in current markets and penetrating newer ones, such as China, India, and Japan and the countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), according to the report.”If Bangladesh can capture 20 per cent of China’s current garment exports, Bangladesh’s total exports would more than double, increasing by US$29 billion and, based on current parameters, create 5.4 million new jobs and 13.5 million new indirect jobs. These would be virtually enough to absorb all new entrants into the labour force over the next decade,” it said.
