FOR several decades, the Asia-Pacific region has experienced the fastest reduction of working poverty and rise of labour incomes worldwide. After the heavy toll inflicted by the Covid pandemic in 2019, unemployment in Asia and the Pacific peaked to 15.7 per cent. That situation witnessed a recovery at 13.9 per cent in 2023. However, those recovery results differ by subregion, reflecting the heterogeneity of the vast continent as well as the diversity of socioeconomic and development contexts. In the South Asia region, the youth unemployment rate at 15 per cent in 2023 is a 15-year low. It may lead to suggesting that the challenges of young people finding work in the subregion are gradually easing even though the youth unemployment rate in the subregion is still the region鈥檚 highest. As well, too many young women remain excluded from the labour force. The quality of jobs that are open to youth is still deemed lacking. Another related point to cite is that the real GDP growth in the Asia region is projected at 4.4 per cent in 2024, more than 1 percentage point below its 2000鈥�2019 average. That means at this pace, about 87.8 million people will remain unemployed during 2025 in Asia.
According to a report by Japan Times, the latest figures indicate that in 2024, roughly 40 per cent of Bangladeshi youth are not in education, employment or training, including those no longer looking for work or registered as unemployed. The authors said that stagnant job growth in the private sector as well as a cooling economy has made public sector jobs more attractive. The recent student protest successfully blocking 30 per cent of jobs of families of freedom fighters kept as reserved is a testimony to the tight employment prospects that young people were objecting to. One important element to highlight is that few young adults in Asia and the Pacific manage to find regular wage-paying jobs that offer protections on pay and working conditions. Only South Asia among the subregions has shown some progress over the past decades in increasing the share of young adult workers aged 25 to 29 in a paid job, ranging a tenure of one year or longer.
One qualitative aspect of the job market in the Asia region is that the incidence of 鈥榯emporary work鈥� among young workers has increased over time and is now 28 per cent in all the subregions in Asia. Both East Asia and South Asia saw the share jump from 20 per cent in 2000 to 28 per cent in 2023 (ILO Report 2024). Thus, we see a qualitative change in the unemployment trend that indicates a positivity in terms of temporary work rather than regular employment.
Bangladesh, long considered a development model for slashing extreme poverty, clocked an average of 6.5 per cent economic growth a year for the past decade. But over these years, youth unemployment climbed to 16 per cent 鈥� the highest in at least the past 30 years, a finding confirmed by the International Labour Organisation in its 2024 report.
China and India recorded the same percentage of young people who are seeking work without success. As well, in Malaysia it is 12.5 per cent and in Indonesia it is 14 per cent. Considering all these populous nations, they add up to 30 million people between the ages of 15 and 24 who are looking for jobs but fail to find suitable ones. ILO鈥檚 data shows that they account for less than half the global total of 65 million jobless youth of that age range. The figures are worse than those in rich countries such as the US, Japan and Germany, where young people tend to get snapped up, though not as bad as slow-growing southern European countries such as Spain and Italy. And for the Asian countries that do not have China鈥檚 broad manufacturing base, the double-digit youth unemployment rates raise urgent actions about how to move up the development ladder and the costs of failing to do so.
The uncertain future of the new generations getting into active life without a prospect of landing with a secure work life is one of the major factors that led to the downfall of the 15-year-old regime led by Sheikh Hasina. It is also a fact that in India, whose economy grew at 8 per cent a year for the past decade or so, its leader, Narendra Modi鈥檚 party, lost its absolute majority in the parliamentary elections early this year. Scrutiny of the voter category who opposed Modi鈥檚 party reveals that they are largely the young people and those who were left out through Modi鈥檚 crony capitalism. Another important revelation of China鈥檚 situation is that China stopped, since 2023, publishing its youth unemployment statistics after it showed more than a fifth of young people were not able to find work. These are not good signs, to say politely.
Globally, unemployment among young people tends to run higher than for the labour force as a whole. The question we face therefore is: Is the ladder to prosperity broken? Citing the case of Bangladesh, we can suggest that it pulled itself out of extreme poverty by becoming the most competitive clothing factory in the world. Millions left the farm for factories. Then the country got stuck in its own ill-defined and unobtrusive and tenuous economic policy. Bangladesh failed to level up to more complex, higher-value productions that could lead to higher skilled, better-paying jobs. That transition is how Japan, South Korea, China and Taiwan became breakout economic successes in the twentieth century.
Next is the challenge posed by automation. It is a phenomenon that has been shifting the landscape all this while. Even Bangladesh鈥檚 main growth engine 鈥� the production of clothes 鈥� is turning to machines over manpower. Garment exports have doubled over the past decade, while overall employment in the sector has grown at a much slower rate. Next is the issue of labour mismatch. In Asia鈥檚 developing nations, each year, more people are pursuing higher education and obtaining college degrees, including in medicine, engineering, computer science, fashion design, finance, marketing, etc. When they are done, their obvious choice is white collar jobs in fields like design, technology, marketing, financial management, etc. However, those are jobs that their own countries do not produce in abundance.
A careful scrutiny of the past two or three decades of development planning of countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia or Thailand in Asia reveals one common characteristic, namely, an over focus on trade and commerce-led growth, neglecting the creation of a sound, technologically savvy and advanced human power that could be used to boost local industrial and services sectors as well as the export of high-income manpower to other rich nations that have been lacking such manpower for some time now. It is still time for the Asian nations to generate such advanced manpower and serve their own economic interests as well as supply them to 鈥榣abour-starved鈥� rich western countries as well as Japan and South Korea. Negative population growth of the past decade, which is continuing in the rich nations, opens up a bright prospect for the Asian countries, whose abundant population can solve the dirty unemployment secret in Asia.
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Humayun Kabir ([email protected]) is a former senior official of the United Nations in New York.
