South Asian region needs to create more jobs per year to boost income at corporate level – Part 1

Corporate sector is the main source of income for any country and South Asian sector is not an exception. However, in the past one decade or so, this sector has incurred severe damages because of the negligence from their national governments and the worst case is Pakistan.

World Bank’s chief economist for South Asia region Dr Kalpana Kochhar sketched out the real picture of the region’s economy in a lecture she delivered at Institute of Business Administration, Karachi on Thursday. During the lecture, she emphasized on the real issue affecting the dwindling economy in the region and on the forefront was labour and wage problem.

According to a recent survey, the corporate sector—including the service and manufacturing industry—has employed a meagre number of only 800,000 employees from 2000 to 2010. This however, does not depict the whole picture. In addition to a dearth of human resource in South Asia, which includes Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, the shortage of utility services is another factor that has inflicted damage in terms of productivity and revenues.

Although the whole region falls in the category of developing countries, the situation in Pakistan is the most worsened. The electricity shortage and the scarcity of natural gas are some of the problems that the service and manufacturing industry is facing at the moment, let alone the political scenario.

However, according to Ms. Kochhar, the main factor to cater in the country is the labour pool that is affected the most. In the last eleven years, though wage rate has increased in the region but as compared to the inflation, most of the workers are still under the poverty line. Only the self-employed labour has managed to improve their standard compared to the measures set by World Bank.

Short URL: https://www.newspakistan.pk/?p=9106

Posted by Usman Khalid on Jan 13 2012. Filed under South Asia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.