Effect of COVID-19 on Bangladeshi Labor Market – A literary Analysis

1.0 Introduction: Based on the policy analysis unit of Bangladesh Bank (2007) Bangladesh experienced a sharp economic growth in the recent decade and as an outcome of the recent economic growth the labor participation rate increased at a substantial rate. Ibid (2007) though believes that it didn’t solve the problem of lack of deficiency of the labor market participation in terms of supply-demand balance of skillful labors. Ibid (2007) provides further information on the following issues: The total labor force grew by almost 9 percent from 2003 to 2007, there were almost 1.5 million new entrants per year within this time period, out of the total new entrants from 2003 to 2007 3.5 million were females and 5.2 million were male. Additionally, the rural labor force grew by 6.3 million and and urban labor force grew by 2.5 million by this time (Ibid, 2007). All these information strongly indicate that the development of Bangladesh labor market was initiated at a larger pace long before the pandemic. Ibid (2007) then describes
that ‘Of the total employed labor force’, 10.2 milion were employed in the formal sector while 78 percent were employed in the informal sector. Ibid (2007) also mentioned that only 0.6 million new jobs were created in the formal sector from 2000 to 2006. Accordingly, one may reach to this conclusion that the imbalanced supply and demand of labor was well existing even before the pandemic despite the huge expansion of the labor market and formal job sector was always lagging behind. Finally, according to Ibid (2007) a key challenge to the Bangladeshi labor market has been the decent growth of formal employment opportunities with wage and self-employment deficiencies as well as lack of gender intensive growth for female workers. From the above, it is clear that the following challenges were pre-existing in Bangladeshi labor market before the pandemic arrived: Lack of gender equality, lack of formal job prospects, and poor wage growth for high skilled workers and also, supply-demand mismatch for high skilled workers. So it will be interesting to find out how deeply these issues can be magnified because of the recent crisis of Coronavirus.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Not applicable

The datasets used in this study are openly available at [repository link] and the source code is available on GitHub at [GitHub link].

This work did not receive any external funding.