摘要：The Pakistan economy is currently going through a period of much needed structural adjustment focusing on: (i) Reducing fiscal deficits from about 6 to 4 per cent of GDP, which should reduce public sector borrowing and bring down interest rates and inflation; (ii) Reducing tariffs from an average of about 80 per cent in 1993 to about 60 per cent currently and about 45 per cent next year – which while requiring painful adjustments particularly in the industrial sectors, should make Pakistan more competitive in the long term and also benefit consumers; (iii) Reducing the size of the public sector in the economy by privatising nationalised banks, nationalised and public sector industry and public utilities including power, gas and telecommunications, which should increase the efficiency of these sectors. All these measures have implications for employment generation. In the short term they are slowing down the economy and therefore employment creation is not taking place at the earlier higher rates. In the long term they should help stabilise the economy and add significantly to economic growth.
Within this context the employment outlook for Pakistan is difficult and challenging at the same time. Difficult because Pakistan’s formal employment growth areas which have been geared to absorb substantial additions to the labour force are no longer directly appropriate for this purpose. And challenging because the large and growing informal sector comprising many small entrepreneurs, could be an important potential source of employment creation. The ability of small entrepreneurs to respond to industrial modernisation in the face of structural reforms will depend on their access to credit and modern production techniques, and the upgrading of their skills, given the present low literacy and skill level of the labour force. Let us first look at each of the formal growth areas.
The government has traditionally been the biggest source of organised institutional employment, with an estimated 4 million workers (within a total national employment envelope of 32 million). These workers in the public sector are also spectacularly numerous when we compare them to the 1.5 million workers in private large scale enterprises employing ten or more people in all Pakistan. It, therefore, has to be recognised that the numbers of public employees cannot be increased any further and in fact need to be reduced. Major immediate reductions will come with the privatisation of public industrial enterprises and public utilities (which together employ about 0.4 million workers). Similarly, large scale industry is coming under competitive pressure with the reduction of tariffs and will therefore not likely increase its employment levels substantially. Small and medium scale industry (particularly textiles) are also very inefficient compared to international standards and will probably shed labour from its current level of about 2 million workers. The labour force directly employed in agriculture (15 million) may increase marginally although recent employment elasticity estimates are close to zero. Construction, trade, transport, communications, financial and other services are likely to be the growth areas of the future. Yet in terms of employment generation they are unlikely to absorb a significant proportion of the new entrants into the labour force. Recent estimates suggest that civilian non-government persons working for wages will probably increase only at modest rates from their current level of 10 million (Chaudhry, 1995). There would be a substantial addition to the labour force if more women were to enter it. The present female labour force participation rate is only 9 per cent.
The good news is that ordinary Pakistanis are increasingly taking their future in their own hands and creating millions of micro-level enterprises. There were 14 million people counted as self-employed in 1992 and while there are some definitional problems associated with this number, e.g. millions of agricultural haris are counted as self-employed, overall they indicate that the bulk of Pakistanis work for themselves. Self-employment numbers become even more staggering when one adds the remaining 7 million unpaid family members who comprise the remaining part of the employed labour force. Thus fully 21 million Pakistanis or 68 per cent of the employed labour force of 31 million in 1992 were working for themselves or their families alone. These ‘micro’ level enterprises have been and will continue to be the growth areas for employment in the future. Government policy is only slowly beginning to focus on the needs and requirements of the sector. One indicator of both government policy and the situation on the ground is scheduled banks advances by size of advance. At end Dec. 1994, there were 7,16,000 advance holders (70 per cent of the total) of Rs. 50,000 and below involving total lending of Rs. 8.8 billion (2.5 per cent of the total) while only 4,998 advance holders (0.5 per cent of the total) had obtained advances of Rs. 185 billion (55 per cent of the total) (State Bank of Pakistan, Annual Report 1994-95).
More recently, starting from the mid 1980s, the government, NGOs and external donor agencies have begun to focus on the micro-enterprise sector. The government’s initial emphasis was on the educated unemployed (e.g. The Small Business Finance Corporation’s Scheme for professionals, then the Youth Investment Promotion Society Programme and then the Self Employment Programme) although it quickly moved to more general micro-level programmes like the short-lived Yellow Cab Scheme. The NGO efforts were exemplified in the external donor supported Agha Khan Rural Development Support Programme in the Northern Areas, the purely indigenous Orangi Pilot Project of Dr. Akhtar Hamid Khan and the more recent and much simpler Government/ILO/Japan ‘Strategic Employment’ initiatives. The scheduled banks have also started small business finance schemes recently. This is therefore a good time to take stock of the various major initiatives in this field.
Loading...
