The Ministry of National Planning and Economic Development will measure the country’s unemployment rate this fiscal year for the first time since 1990, with assistance from the International Labour Organisation (ILO), Lae Lae Thein, deputy minister of the ministry, told the Lower House on September 24.
The estimated unemployment rate of 4.01 per cent for 2013 was derived from calculations based on a labour survey from 1990, she said in response to questions from MP Thein Tun, underscoring the importance of the new labour market survey.
Since the 1990 survey, the unemployment rate has been calculated using population increases reported by the Ministry of Immigration and Population, whose recent census found that the country’s population was 9 million people short of its estimate.
The low jobless rate also flies in the face of a report compiled by the Lower House’s planning and finance development committee last year. It found the unemployment rate was about 37 percent, while more than one-quarter of the country’s population lives in dire poverty. The committee made public portions of what it described as the first-ever nationwide survey of income and employment in mid-January last year.
Thein Tun had asked Lae Lae Thein about staffing in the public and private sector, salaries, the unemployment rate and employment measures that will be implemented for migrants returning to Myanmar.
As of the end of June, 903,366 permanent government staff totalled 903,366, she said, adding that the government had earmarked a budget of Ks 1.994 trillion (US$1.9 billion) to cover their salaries this fiscal year. The number of non-permanent staff has reached about 20,000, and Ks 152.382 billion has been set aside for their salaries this year, including additional and regional allowances, the deputy minister added.
According to data from 2012, the number of people employed by private firms was 895,597.
Farm work is the most common type of employment in Myanmar, but this work is seasonal.
The government signed an agreement with the ILO last November to conduct the unemployment survey. ILO liaison officer for Myanmar, Steve Marshall, described it as “the first comprehensive national labour force survey in the country since 1990”.
“The survey will also focus on youth employment and the challenges that youth face in moving from school to decent work. It will also help to identify policies to promote gender equality in the workplace,” he told a jobs’ fair earlier this year.
Marshall’s comments were similar to those made by Aung San Suu Kyi at an address to the ILO in Geneva in June, in which she raised concerns about the plight of jobless youths. “It is not so much joblessness as hopelessness that threatens our future. Unemployed youth lose confidence in the society that has failed to give them the chance to realise their potential,” she said.
She also stressed the need to equip young people with the skills needed to enter the workforce. “Vocational training linked to job creation is imperative if we are to safeguard the future by giving our youth the capacity to handle effectively that responsibility that will inevitably fall to them one day,” she said.
By: Myanmar Eleven