Pakistan unemployment: 27.6% rise in people seeking jobs overseas

The number of Pakistanis seeking jobs abroad in the year 2021 has risen to 27.6 per cent as compared to the previous year, local media reported.

This comes as there has been a decline in Pakistan's employment market. To add to the woes, the COVID pandemic has given another blow to the opportunities for employment in Pakistan which is shrinking by the day.

Pakistan's Bureau of Emigration Overseas Employment (BEOE) in the year 2021, registered 2,86,648 workers for overseas employment. This represents a 27.6 per cent increase over the previous year, reported Dawn.

Among the main destinations for unskilled migrant workers are the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Oman and Qatar.

A total of 54 per cent of Pakistani sought to move to Saudi Arabi, 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 FinLit 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.