Research
Overseas Employment and Remittance: Exploring the Nexus in the Context of Bangladesh
Science 1960s, Bangladesh met with regular and enormous labor migration to overseas countries and it is now one of the salient remittance gaining countries in Asia. With a few exceptions, manpower export has been showing increasing trend year by year. Most of the expatriates, who are largely unskilled, are working in the Middle East countries and in the UK and the USA. Like overseas employment, remittances flow has been increasing every year with its increased share in GDP and becomes vital elements for accelerating economic growth in Bangladesh. In this study, In addition to exploring current trend of migration & remittance inflows, we investigate whether there is any significant relationship between inflows of foreign remittances and overseas employment. We also made an effort to identify some barriers that impedes overseas employment and remittance earnings and considering these aspects, we suggest some recommendations that can gear our remittance earnings. Our analysis reveals that the relationship between remittance earning and overseas employment is statistically significant.
Effects of Sectoral Transformation of Employment on GDP in Bangladesh
Macroeconomic variables indicate the overall situation of the country, which we expect to be more consistent, stable and grow over time. The unemployment rate in Bangladesh is 5% at 2012 which is lower than world unemployment (around 6%). Labor Force participation rate is also higher in Bangladesh (73.8% in 2000). On the other hand GDP growth rate even in 2008 was 6.6% where most of the countries had a negative growth rate in their GDP. In Bangladesh, more than 2% of GDP increase due to employment growth. The labor force was 49.5 million in 2006 which becomes 53.7 million in 2009 and now 54.1 million. The growth rate has been 2.7 percentage points a year. At the same time, GDP also increase at around 6% in last decade. In GDP, the share of agriculture sector is decreasing where other two major sectors industry and services are increasing and the same thing occurs in the case of employment. This study focuses on the parallel transformation of employment and GDP and its impact on our economy.
