The rate of unemployment in Pakistan is soaring with a 27.6 per cent compared to last year, according to a new report. The report shows that the number of people seeking jobs aboard is up by 27.6 per cent, due to an alarming rate of unemployment and scarcity jobs in the country. The crisis is further worsened by the covid-19 pandemic that led to the closures of various companies.
The Pakistan’s Bureau of Emigration Overseas Employment (BEOE) in the year 2021 says it registered 2, 86,648 workers for overseas employment, a 27.6 per cent increase over the previous year.
Many unskilled migrant workers opt for Oman, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. At least 54 per cent of Pakistani are said to have sought to move to Saudi Arabia, 13.4 per cent to Oman and 13.2 pc to Qatar. Meanwhile, it has been witnessed that there is an overall increasing trend in terms of migrants registered in 2021 as compared to 2020.
Bifurcating the provincial data reveals that Punjab province had the most workers go abroad, with 1, 56,877, followed by Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with 76,213 individuals, as per the media portal. Meanwhile, according to the findings of a survey conducted by the Institute of Public Opinion and Research (IPOR), 43 per cent of respondents slammed the three-year rule by former Prime Minister Imran Khan-led government for its inability to control inflation and for the country’s debilitating economy.
Earlier, Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah also slammed the Imran Khan-led government and said it wasted many precious years of the country. Sanaullah said PTI played havoc with the economy through most unstable and everyday changing tax policies, which plunged the country into the quagmire of inflation.
The Interior Minister said that PTI only painted a rosy picture and made false promises which proved a total failure. He said the burden of foreign loans had become unbearable only because of the ill-conceived policies of the PTI. Meanwhile, in its recent ‘Pakistan Development Update’, the World Bank has highlighted the structural weaknesses of Pakistan’s economy which include low investment, low exports, and a low productivity growth cycle. Further, high domestic demand pressures and rising global commodity prices would lead to double-digit inflation in the country. Moreover, the growth momentum is not expected to pick up in Pakistan in the near future as a sharp spike in the import bill would also impact the Pakistani Rupee adversely, as per local media.
The World Bank report cites the financial sector’s inadequacy as one of the reasons for this low growth. According to the Standard and Poor’s Ratings Global Financial Literacy Survey 2015 (S & P Global Fin Lit Survey), only 26 per cent of the adults in Pakistan are financially literate. Thus, limited financial literacy in Pakistan is concerning for the investors as it has exacerbated the informality challenge in the country.
