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Jobs for the boys... (and girls)
Bangladesh last year imported more than 50,000 sweater machines which, according to a friend of mine in the ready made garment industry, will require 150,000 skilled workers to operate.
Another emerging industry, ship building, will need thousands of specialized welders and fitters while one of the major container lines needs thousands of young men and women to work onboard their ships all across the world as crewmembers.
All the above stories fit the
Invest-ment=Exports=Growth=Jobs= Poverty Reduction" model perfectly. It is the model that is today the most widely accepted formula for progress in most developing countries. Quite simply we are to export our way out of poverty.
The idea was perhaps taken to its most extreme by John Tiernez in the New York Times on 16th October last year, when he argued that Walmart, the US low cost retailer, had been the most significant driver of "Third World" poverty reduction in recent times! His argument was that supplying the retail colossus had created millions of new jobs in developingcountries.
But while jobs created by export growth should be welcomed, it is worth examining whether they really add that much to net employment, especially if export success is accompanied by the sudden removal of import tariffs. On a broader level, can economic growth that excludes large
sections of the country, notably the rural areas, really take Bangladesh forward?
I et's look at some facts.
The country that has moved the highest numbers of people out of poverty in the last two decades is China. The relentless manufacturing juggernaut is the envy of the
world due to its sustained economic growth. But for all the growth, Chinese manufacturing employment peaked in 1995 and despite a slight recovery in recent years, today is still around 12 percent lower than the levels of the mid 1990s, according to official Chinese government statistics. So China has recently been experiencing "jobless” growth which, I believe, is a serious danger for developing economies such as ours as well.
It is also interesting to note that the period of highest employment generation in China was before their joining the WTO and import liberalization. The reason is the two pronged strategy of export led growth and over exuberant trade liberalization which leads to the sudden reduced viability of small local producers. The new jobs created by export growth are often not enough to compensate for the old jobs lost due to the sudden influx of cheap imports.
At a conference at JNU University Nevy Delhi last June the presenters argued that the "Hindu rate of growth”(pre -liberalization when the Indian economy was closed and heavily protected) was in fact
higher than the present rate of growth of jobs in the new liberalized import regime.
The reasons being that in the new India employment growth has been more in the informal sector, increased use of “casual" labour and the rise of outsourcing in the organized sector. The loss of jobs in agriculture due to urbanization .mechanization and indebtedness in India is well known. This should not be misconstrued as an argument for protectionism. But when one of the oldest and largest footwear retailers in Bangladesh, tells me that they have moved production of 49,000 pairs of shoe uppers per week from local factories to China, due to import tariff reductions, and as a result thousands of local jobs have been lost, surely we must begin to ask where the jobs will come from? Can we transform all these shoe makers into sendee providers, sales persons and call centre operators? Doubtful.
Driving output growth through new investments, both foreign and domestic, may lead to employment generation but that by itself will not be enough. Not if we wish to move more people out of
poverty and raise their standards of living to the much coveted Middle Income Status by 2020. It is very important that we start to look at the nature of our employment generation as well. In recent years the employment growth through exports especially RMG has been undermined by the loss of jobs in traditional sectors due to import penetration.
Generating economic growth is one of the biggest issues facing all economies today but the results show that it should be part of the solution and not the panacea for all our ills. The challenge is to make the growth inclusive. Our strategies and policies need to be evaluated not only on the growth scale but also on the jobs creation scale. The focus thus needs as much to be on raising employment generation through productivity and the two pre-requisites for this are investments in health and education.
Unless we can do this, we will only be providing jobs fora few of the boys.... and girls... and to be honest, they may not be worth having.
Syed Nasim Manzur Is an economist turned shoe maker and entrepreneur.