New Delhi, Jan 4 (IANS) The Pakistan government “continues to peddle a
comforting unemployment rate of 7 per cent”, yet, according to prominent
economist Dr Hafeez Pasha, the real figure is closer to 22 per cent, according
to an article in the Pakistani media.
“The ground reality is far grimmer: 8–9 million Pakistanis are openly
unemployed. 15–18 million are underemployed, trapped in low-productivity,
informal work. Over 2.2 million youth enter the labour force every year. GDP
growth of 2.5–3.5per cent absorbs barely half of them. This is not a temporary
mismatch. It is a permanent and expanding backlog of wasted human potential,
wilfully ignored by the state,” the article in the Karachi-headquartered
Business Recorder said.
After two decades, Pakistan’s export basket remains trapped in low-value
textiles and commodities. Engineering, electronics, chemicals, and IT services
remain marginal. Without value-chain migration, scalable job creation is a
mirage, it observed.
The article highlighted that tariffs and subsidies protect rent-seeking
incumbents instead of driving productivity. Pakistan does not lack factories; it
lacks competitive factories. Labour-intensive manufacturing is sacrificed to
monopolies.
The article also pointed out that the country’s universities mass-produce
degrees disconnected from market needs, while technical and vocational education
is starved of funding and prestige. The outcome is educated unemployment– the
most volatile and politically dangerous form.
Pakistan’s unemployment crisis is no accident of fate. It is not the result of
global headwinds or temporary shocks. It is a direct, predictable, and
manufactured outcome — the consequence of deliberate policy choices made year
after year, the article lamented.
The article painted a grim outlook ahead. Five years from now, if this blueprint
remains unchanged, by 2029, Pakistan will be a country with 20+ million
unemployed with an economy where 60 per cent of labour is informal and insecure.
It would simultaneously face skilled labour shortages and mass joblessness,
trapped in low exports, low productivity, and stagnant per-capita income. In
other words, it will be a permanent tinderbox of social unrest, and at that
stage, reform will no longer be policy-driven. It will be panic-driven, in the
middle of systemic collapse, it added.
–IANS
sps/vd
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