Employment and Unemployment Scenario of Bangladesh: A Trends Analysis

Economic growth is necessary for poverty reduction, but not sufficient. Bangladesh has experienced rapid economic growth, structural shifts in the economy, increase in educational attainment levels, and rapid urbanization since gaining its independence in 1971. Empirical evidences showed that, productive employment plays a key role in transmitting the benefits of economic growth into poverty reduction. As a labor abundant country, the prospect of the entire economy of Bangladesh depends on the features of the labor market. The changing features of the composition of labor force, employment, unemployment scenario depends on various factors such as demography, structural change, change of social attitude. In Bangladesh, labor force participation is growing at a faster pace than the current employment generating capacity of the economy making it difficult for the country to absorb the incremental labor force in productive and remunerative employment. In this paper we have seen that labor force participation increasing in a steady way, female participation on labor force are increasing rapidly, labor participation on others sectors are more than agricultural sector. Labor are migrating rural to urban due to industrialization and development of infrastructure. As such, the country needs higher and more employment intensive economic growth for which adoption of several complementary approaches could be useful, such as giving priority to more employment friendly growth policies, widening micro credit based and targeted employment generating programs and special schemes for new job creation especially in rural areas, and increasingly tapping overseas employment opportunities focusing on skill intensive jobs in the global market. Keywords: Labor force, Employment, Unemployment