Pakistan and its chronic unemployment

Pakistan is a nation that has been plagued by many problems throughout it’s more than 6 decades of existence. But one problem that has plagued it persistently is that of unemployment. It has an unemployment rate of 15.4% and ranks on 152/199 on the world employment table. Having one of the world’s largest populations also means that this 15.4% is a very large number in its own right. Now we know some basic problems as to why there is so much unemployment in our country, but there are also some problems that are not highlighted.
Unemployment is defined by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) as the number of people, over 18, willing and able to find work at a certain wage rate, but unable to find it. The claimant count method states that the unemployed can be found by counting the number of people receiving unemployment benefits in the country. Since Pakistan does not have a solid unemployment benefit system, it is safe to assume that our unemployment is mostly measured by those who want but can’t find any work. Even if we do not know the hard statistics, we can clearly tell how bad the situation is in Pakistan. First and foremost, one of the major reasons why Pakistan continues to have such low employment and is still a developing nation is because of its low literacy rate. It is claimed that Pakistan has a 49% literacy rate, but the only measure of that is the people who can write or sign their own names. This lack of skill and education means, that most of the population is left doing menial jobs such as driving, farming and manual labor because they are not able to find any jobs. With the 6th largest population in the world, and such a high unemployment rate, it is a pity that Pakistan has still not been able to build a proper education system so that more people can change from unskilled to skilled jobs. Due to this structural failure and the people’s own stubbornness to not get their children educated, generations and generations of people remain unemployed, which is why our country’s economic condition keeps getting worse.
In order for an economy to be successful, and employment to reach a favorable level, people not only need to focus on gaining a better education but it is the government’s and agencies’ task to alert them about diversifying their education. If an economy has too many doctors and fewer entrepreneurs, it might have good health care, but it will not have innovation and new ideas to earn profit in the economy. If there are a lot of Business students, there will be more unemployed business graduates because the economy only needs so many people from a certain field. What the people, and especially students need to do in this country is diversify in their fields of study and not pursue a certain track because sooner or later that will change and another field will be more in demand. If there is a good balance of people in all the fields, there will be fewer problems like saturation and unemployment in the country, at least for those who have worked hard to gain a quality education. What this article serves to prove and warn is not only why unemployment persists in our economy and why it is bad, but also to show our people that having a uni-dimensional mindset regarding education is not going to help this problem in any way. People need to broaden their visions and understand that there is more to look for in a certain field than its current boom or decline. No skill is expendable and we should work and study our best in order to help our country come out of the quagmire it finds itself in at present.
Another reason why Pakistan continues to be at the bottom of the employment statistics is because of its prevailing security situation. It affects Pakistan in a number of evident ways. The volatile law and order situation by discourages international and even local investment in the country. Due to this lack of investment, there are lesser businesses in the country, which means lesser jobs and ultimately a lesser number of people to be employed. With the security situation worsening all the time, foreigners and even locals do not want to invest in land and risk losing it if landlords or tribal lords take over the land, they do not want to set up a factory at the risk of it being blown away in no time and they would not risk a trading business for the governments policy to change overnight. The economy and country remain unsafe and unpredictable, and these are two conditions which would fail even the most lucrative economies in the world, let alone an already stumbling one. The government policies, have failed to help the economy and improve the security situation and due to that, the unemployment rate in the country remains one of the highest in the world.
Another major problem is job saturation in the job market. Now you may ask, what this over saturation is. This is mostly concerned with a large number of people going for the same profession and there not being enough jobs for all of those people, hence causing most of them to remain unemployed. Pakistan does not have the highest or best of literacy rates and not everyone in Pakistan can afford to gain higher education. Those who do get higher education i.e bachelors or masters degrees, have a chance to not only work in their own businesses but also as a safety they have jobs to fall back on. This on paper would solve the employment problems for those people who have degrees under their belts but it does not. Why is this so you ask? Well the major reason is the mindset or trend of the Pakistani people. What has happened throughout its history is that there has been over saturation in the job market for one or more professions at a time, leaving all the other options virtually idle. It can be highlighted with the examples that we have seen throughout history. When first in Pakistan, there was a certain boom in the market for doctors and higher demand, most people who could afford to send their children for higher education, sent them to become doctors. Even though such steps can be deemed economically sound, since there is demand in the market, but it proceeded to have a negative impact because there were more doctors in the market than needed and many other sectors in the economy remained ignored. The poor health care that Pakistan has today can be attributed to this fact as these individuals sought to gain maximum profit from their jobs and in essence neglected the very people that they were supposed to treat. The more affordable doctors in the government hospitals barely had the knack or concern to treat the vast number patients that came to them. The same was seen again later on when the economy’s demand for engineers increased and a similar effect reigned in the economy. Recently we have seen an increasing amount of MBA’s in the economy which is just tarnishing the reputation of those who had them from esteemed institutes and also leaving many of them unemployed because of the limited job opportunities in the economy.