The country saw a total of 71.16 million employed individuals in the first quarter of current year, representing a marginal increase of just 60 thousand compared to the same period last year when it stood at 71.1 million, reveals Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS).
Despite a negligible increase in employment of less than 0.1%, the departure of 1.87 million working-age individuals from the labor market kept the unemployment rate unchanged at 2.51%, with the number of unemployed people remaining at 2.59 million, further revealed the quarterly report of the labour force survey.
The average number of unemployed people was 2.47 million in the last year, which indicates 0.12 million increase in unemployment in first three months of the current year, found analysing the provisional report made available on Monday by the BBS.
The number of people not in labour force reached 48.26 million in January-March period which was 46.39 million in the same period last year. Around 1.87 million working-age people left the labour market in a year, read the report.
The BBS calculates unemployment rate comparing employed people with people engaged with the labour force ignoring the number of people of working age people who are not engaged with the labour market.
Experts and economists said that the BBS has always shown the number of employed people to be higher and the unemployment rate to be lower taking advantage of the weakness in the definition of employment.
They believe that the number of unemployed will increase as well as the unemployment rate considering the number of people who are not looking for jobs due to lack in the availability work.
The BBS report said that the number of unemployed males stood at 1.74 million in the reporting period from 1.71 million in the previous year.
The increase of 30 thousand in male unemployment has been offset by a reduction of the same number of female unemployed to 0.85 million in the current year from 0.88 million in the previous year.
The unemployment rate among males increased to 3.59% in January-March period from 3.54% of the same period of last year. However, the rate among female reduced significantly to 3.36% from 3.46% at the same time.
Officials of the BBS said that the number of unemployed people being calculated according to rule of the International Labor Organization (ILO), is the number of people who seeks jobs in the last month and failed to manage work for even for one hour in the last week.
There are 73.75 million of working force in the country, among which 48.45 million are male and 25.3 million are female.
71.16 million of them are working in different sectors while 46.71 million of male and 24.45 million of female.
Highest 31.83 million of people, 44.73% labour force are working in the agriculture sector according to the report. Service sector hosts 26.58 million of worker while remaining 12.75 million are working in industry sector.
Whatever, the agriculture and service sector released some surplus labours in the last year which been occupied by industrial sector.
"The definition of BBS fails to represent the actual number of unemployed people in the country and also addressing the challenges facing the people out of labor market," said Dr Sayema Haque Bidisha, professor of Economics at Dhaka University.
She said the reduction in employment rate would be appreciated if it would be achieved by generating new employment, not by reducing labour force participation.
“On the one hand, a large number of people are working for very short span of time as family helpers instead of for payments, On the other hand, a significant number of people are restraining themselves from seeking jobs due to little probability of availing jobs. The BBS does not count such people as unemployed, which is absurd,” she concluded.
Analysing data, it found that the number of working-aged females who remained out of labour market increased to 36.58 million from 35.2 million in the last year. Leaving 1.38 million females from the job market helped to reduce the female unemployment rate.
The report found highest 1.46 million of youth age 15-29 years disappeared from the market and the number stood at 25.92 million in the current year from 27.38 million of the last year.
Towfiqul Islam Khan, Senior Research Fellow at Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) identified the sluggish employment as a reflection of reducing economic growth.
He said that the production sector of the economy is facing significant challenges caused by rising costs of raw materials, restrictions in import, shortage of forex reserve and also a significant shrink in aggregate demands to cope with inflation by people.
"Businesses are operating their activities at a minimum scale which ptevents employment growth," he added.
