Comment by Riaz Haq on September 10, 2017 at 7:57pm

 There is a wide range of figures quoted for TFR in Pakistan.

Some estimates like the ones from the World Bank and Population Research Bureau (PRB) are as high as 3.6. 

Now the CIA estimated Pakistan's population at 201,995,540 as of July 2016. 

That's really close to the 207 million Census 2017 population figure. 

So I think the CIA pyramid is a pretty good starting point for TFR estimation. 

It requires some work to figure out a reasonable TFR estimate using raw data from population pyramid. 

Here's a rough calculation of total fertility rate in Pakistan that I have done: 

Population of Women 15-50 years: 50 million

girls 15-19 10 million

women 20-24 10 million

women 25-29 9 million

women 30-34 7 million

women 35-39 5 million

women 40-44 4 million

women 45-49 4 million 

Median age in the country: 23.4 years .... 104 million below this age

Let's assume these 104 million are children of 50 million women 15-50 years. Let's also assume 20 million of these women will have another 1.5 children per woman to add another 30 million children 

So it's 134 million children among 50 million women 

It works out to total fertility rate of 2.68 children per woman. 

Based on data from https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/graphic...

and https://theodora.com/wfbcurrent/pakistan/pakistan_people.html 

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 10, 2017 at 8:13pm

INDIA - Bloomberg reports that India's Youth will be the World's Future by having the strongest workforce in the world. 

Half of India's population are millennials, under the age of 25 whereas two-thirds of the country's population is below the age of 35. 

India's workforce is expected to increase to a billion people between the ages of 16 and 54. 
The workforce is expected to derive from North India where Uttar Pradesh has a fertility rate of nearly 3 whilst its neighbouring state, Bihar boasts a fertility rate of 3.3. Taking into account Bihar's already 100 million population, the state is expected to contribute generously to the establishment of a leading workforce. 

India's current demographic transition is occurring on a large scale. 

Compared to China's generation mainly in their 50's who have removed their country from poverty to middle-status income, India's population in their 20's are expected to do the same. 

Similarly, South Africa's increasing workforce have been trained and prepared for the workplace by Workforce Holdings this year. Independent Online reported in March that diversified services company, Workforce Holdings have trained nearly 15 000 individuals in preparation for the workplace. 

The group provides a number of work-related services including temporary as well as permanent recruitment. 1 100 permanent staff are employed by Workforce Holdings and the company has 32 000 temporary contractors weekly. 

Workforce Holdings is also listed on the AltX board of the JSE. 


https://www.iol.co.za/business-report/india-may-soon-knock-out-chin... 

Raghuram Rajan flags India's biggest worry that could cost Modi a win in 2019 elections: Slow Job Growth 

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/policy/raghuram-ra...

"Remember that we have what we call the population dividend. A million new people entering the labor force every month," Rajan said. "If we don’t provide these jobs that are required, you have a million dissatisfied entrants. And that could create a lot of social mischief." 

Rajan is right in this aspect. India will have the world’s biggest labor force by 2027 and the millennial generation is crucial to anchor one of the fastest paces of economic growth. However, fresh employment opp .. 

Under Modi, just over 10,000 jobs a month are being created instead, according to government figures from 2015. 

Read more at:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/60434472.cms?utm_so...

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 14, 2017 at 8:24am

India's consumption story set to end due to low jobs growth, investment, warns Ambit

http://www.firstpost.com/business/indias-consumption-story-set-to-e...

The ongoing consumption demand that began in fiscal 2012 is unsustainable given the poor employment growth as private sector investments still remains a far cry, and this growth story may get hard stop soooner than later, warned a brokerage in a report.

According to Ambit Capital, despite the slowdown in income and employment growth between FY12 and FY17, private consumption continued to grow at a rapid pace, especially in categories like FMCG and passenger vehicles "showing resilience".

As per the brokerage, the rise of consumption growth over FY12 to FY17 has been driven by higher retail credit.

"As corporate credit demand waned over 2011-12 to 2106-17, both NBFCs and banks pushed retail credit aggressively. The retail credit-GDP ratio rose from 13 percent to 16 percent in 2016-17," Ambit said.

However, it noted the "current bout of consumption growth appears unsustainable mainly because consumption boom has uniquely been accompanied by a contraction in the investment-GDP ratio" to 7 percent during FY12 to FY17, while the ratio for consumption-GDP is 3 percent.

"Cross-country evidence suggests that only consumption booms that are accompanied by an increase in investments tend to be sustainable as this is a tangible proof of jobs being created and/or efficiency improving," it said where the averages of these have been 4 percent each.

The report also noted that the current retail credit-funded consumption binge is likely to experience a "hard stop" sooner than later on basis of various trends, including a plunge in consumer confidence to a four-year low during the first quarter of the current fiscal.

Besides, households' savings ratio at an 18-year low and retail NPA problems have begun to emerge particularly in the housing finance segment, are also factors which could effect retail credit-funded consumption, Ambit said.

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 14, 2017 at 10:36am

Are we entering into a "jobless" growth phase in South Asia?

By Dr. Selim Raihan, Professor, Department of Economics, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Executive Director, South Asian Network on Economic Modeling (SANEM).

http://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/economics/are-we-entering-joble...

The relationship between economic growth and employment is an important issue in economics discourse. Promotion of inclusive growth also requires economic growth processes to be employment friendly. The measure that captures the employment effect of economic growth is the "employment elasticity" of economic growth, which is the ratio of percentage change in employment to the percentage change in real gross domestic product (GDP).

We have calculated the employment elasticity with respect to the change in real GDP for the South Asian countries for three different periods from 2001 to 2015. There are mixed patterns among the South Asian countries. During 2001 and 2005, Maldives had the largest employment elasticities (1.39) and Sri Lanka had the lowest one (0.08). India, with a share of 75 percent of the total population in South Asia, had the employment elasticity of only 0.38, one of the lowest in South Asia. Two other large countries, Pakistan and Bangladesh, had employment elasticities of 0.70 and 0.77 respectively. 

For the period of 2006-2010, India experienced a drastic fall in employment elasticity to only 0.03 despite the fact that the average GDP growth rate of India increased from 6.6 percent (2001-2005) to more than 8 percent (2006-2010). Over these periods, Bangladesh also had a similar experience where employment elasticity declined from 0.77 to 0.4 in the wake of a rising average GDP growth rate from 5 to 6 percent. While Afghanistan, Maldives, and Nepal also experienced a decline, Pakistan and Sri Lanka could increase the elasticities.

Over the recent period between 2011 and 2015, Bangladesh experienced a further fall in the employment elasticity to 0.28, while India's improvement is meagre (from 0.03 to only 0.09). Despite the slower economic growth rates during this period, Afghanistan, Maldives, Nepal, and Pakistan could increase their employment elasticities. Sri Lanka had a further fall in employment elasticity to only 0.14. During this period, India had the least employment elasticity among all South Asian countries.


The aforementioned analysis points to the concern that two major South Asian countries, India and Bangladesh, experienced a substantial reduction in employment elasticities throughout the periods of high economic growth. While during 2001 and 2005, the annual average job creation in Bangladesh and India were 1.6 million and 11.3 million respectively, in 2011-2015, such numbers declined to 1 million and 3.2 million for Bangladesh and India respectively. Most of the other South Asian countries experienced either volatile, or slow or stagnant economic growth, and therefore, despite a rise in employment elasticities, the actual employment generation in these countries had not been substantial. It is also important to mention that while SDG 8 talks about ensuring "decent" jobs for all, South Asian countries are seriously lagging far behind. In most of the South Asian countries, there are persistent employment challenges such as lack of economic diversification, poor working conditions, low productivity and a high degree of informality. This is reflected by the fact that among the top five countries in the world with very high proportion of informal employment in total employment, four are from South Asia (Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan).

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 14, 2017 at 5:58pm

When 3 million people died in 1943 Bengal famine caused by the British decision to divert food supplies for war, Churchill said it's the Indians' own fault because they breed like rabbits". 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/not-his-finest-hour-t...

Many of his colleagues thought Churchill was driven by a deep loathing of democracy for anyone other than the British and a tiny clique of supposedly superior races. This was clearest in his attitude to India. When Mahatma Gandhi launched his campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill raged that he "ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back." As the resistance swelled, he announced: "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion." This hatred killed. To give just one, major, example, in 1943 a famine broke out in Bengal, caused – as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has proved – by the imperial policies of the British. Up to 3 million people starved to death while British officials begged Churchill to direct food supplies to the region. He bluntly refused. He raged that it was their own fault for "breeding like rabbits". At other times, he said the plague was "merrily" culling the population.

Skeletal, half-dead people were streaming into the cities and dying on the streets, but Churchill – to the astonishment of his staff – had only jeers for them. This rather undermines the claims that Churchill's imperialism was motivated only by an altruistic desire to elevate the putatively lower races.

Hussein Onyango Obama is unusual among Churchill's victims only in one respect: his story has been rescued from the slipstream of history, because his grandson ended up as President of the US. Churchill believed that Kenya's fertile highlands should be the preserve of the white settlers, and approved the clearing out of the local "blackamoors". He saw the local Kikuyu as "brutish children". When they rebelled under Churchill's post-war premiership, some 150,000 of them were forced at gunpoint into detention camps – later dubbed "Britain's gulag" by Pulitzer-prize winning historian, Professor Caroline Elkins. She studied the detention camps for five years for her remarkable book Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, explains the tactics adopted under Churchill to crush the local drive for independence. "Electric shock was widely used, as well as cigarettes and fire," she writes. "The screening teams whipped, shot, burned, and mutilated Mau Mau suspects." Hussein Onyango Obama never truly recovered from the torture he endured.

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 22, 2017 at 9:05am

Here are the key statistics reported by Credit Suisse:

Total Household Wealth Mid-2016 :

India $3,099 billion Pakistan $524 billion

Wealth per adult:

India Year End 2000 Average $2,036 Median $498.00

Pakistan Year End 2000 Average $2,399 Median $1,025

India Mid-2016 Average $3,835 Median $608

Pakistan Mid-2016 Average $4,595 Median $1,788

Average wealth per adult in Pakistan is $760 more than in India or about 20% higher.

Median wealth per adult in Pakistan is $1,180 more than in India or about 120% higher

http://www.riazhaq.com/2016/11/cs-wealth-report-2016-average-pakist...

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 28, 2017 at 9:27pm

#Pakistan boasts the world's fastest growing retail market. Growing middle class & youth bulge are big reasons why.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-28/135-million-mill...

Middle class expected to surpass U.K., Italy over 2016-21
By Faseeh Mangi
September 28, 2017, 1:00 PM PDT
From 
Nearly two-thirds of Pakistan population under 30 years old
Pakistan’s retail stores forecast to grow by 50% in 5 years
Pakistan’s burgeoning youth and their freewheeling attitude toward rising incomes have turned the nation into the world's fastest growing retail market.

The market is predicted to expand 8.2 percent per annum through 2016-2021 as disposable income has doubled since 2010, according to research group Euromonitor International. The size of the middle class is estimated to surpass that of the U.K. and Italy in the forecast period, it said.

Pakistan's improving security environment, economic expansion at near 5 percent and cheap consumer prices are driving shoppers to spend up big. Almost two-thirds of the nation's 207.8 million people are aged under 30, according to the Jinnah Institute, an Islamabad-based think tank.

“We have a new millennial shopper at hand. They don’t mind spending to have the kind of lifestyle they would like,” said Shabori Das, senior research analyst at Euromonitor. “It’s not like the Baby Boomer generation where savings for the future generation was important.”

Pakistan is bucking the trend in the U.S. -- where stores are closing at a record pace as e-commerce undermines bricks-and-mortar. It's also attracting foreign operators: Turkish home appliance maker Arcelik AS and Dutch dairy giant Royal FrieslandCampina NV entered the market last year via acquisitions. Meanwhile, Hyundai Motor Co., Kia Motors Corp. and Renault SA are all building plants in the South Asian nation.

Pakistan’s retail stores are expected to increase by 50 percent to 1 million outlets in the five years through 2021, Euromonitor said. Its three biggest malls, Lucky One in Karachi and Packages Mall and Emporium Mall in Lahore, opened in the past two years.

Pakistan is mirroring what India went through about four years ago. Both countries have young populations with more income and less inclination toward saving which is a distinct difference to what retailers elsewhere are dealing with, said Das.

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 11, 2019 at 8:21pm

The country’s unemployment ratio stood around 5.8 percent in the country, according to a survey of Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) on labor force 2017-18.

https://dunyanews.tv/en/Business/473968-Unemployment-ratio-stands-a...

http://www.pbs.gov.pk/sites/default/files//Labour%20Force/publicati...

http://www.pbs.gov.pk/content/labour-force-survey-2017-18-annual-re...

While the ratio of male unemployment stood at 5.1 percent, unemployment ratio in female stood at 8.3 percent.

As per the data released by PBS, agriculture sector provided 38 percent of employment in FY17-18, less than the 42 percent it was providing five years ago.

Industrial sector provided 23.7 percent of jobs in the said period, whereas the ratio was 22.6 percent five years back.

Service sector provided jobs to 37.8 percent, a slight jump from 35.1 percent five years back

Furthermore, literacy rate in country stood around 62.2 percent, with literacy rate for male at 71.6 percent and female at 51.8 percent.

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 22, 2019 at 10:29am

#Israel admits #Ethiopian women were given birth control shots. Result: 50-percent decline over the past 10 years in the birth rate of Israel’s Ethiopian community. #populationcontrol #racism https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-ethiopians-fooled-into...

About six weeks ago, on an Educational Television program journalist Gal Gabbay revealed the results of interviews with 35 Ethiopian immigrants. The women’s testimony could help explain the almost 50-percent decline over the past 10 years in the birth rate of Israel’s Ethiopian community. According to the program, while the women were still in transit camps in Ethiopia they were sometimes intimidated or threatened into taking the injection. “They told us they are inoculations,” said one of the women interviewed. “They told us people who frequently give birth suffer. We took it every three months. We said we didn’t want to.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 25, 2021 at 11:48am

The New Population Bomb

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The-Big-Story/The-new-population-...

"A few years ago, we would get three times more recruits than we could accept," observed an employee with a staffing company in Vietnam that recruits workers for Japan's Technical Intern Training Program. "These days, we can barely get twice as many. Within five years, the number of people working away from home may start to drop."

Many Asian economies have experienced this phenomenon already, known in economics as the Lewis turning point, after British economist W. Arthur Lewis. Workers migrate from rural areas to cities, supporting economic growth by working for low wages. Eventually, growth stops because of rising wages and a shrinking labor force.

The answer, in many cases has been immigrants, which have contributed to growth in developed countries after population growth slowed. According to the U.N., there were 281 million international migrants in 2020, 1.6 times more than roughly 20 years earlier.

Border restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted how dependent some countries have become on foreign workers.



Without immigration, many advanced economies already cannot sustain their labor pool. In the U.K. after Brexit, the combination of immigration restrictions and the pandemic has led to a severe labor shortage. Before the pandemic, 12% of heavy truck drivers were from the European Union. However, drivers can no longer be hired from outside the country under the U.K.'s new standards. According to the British Road Haulage Association, the country faces a shortage of more than 100,000 commercial heavy truck drivers. Logistics companies are becoming desperate, raising hourly wages by 30%.

The lack of immigration may not be a temporary phenomenon. The countries with the most outbound immigrants are seeing their young populations decline. The number of Indians between the ages of 15 and 29 will peak in 2025. In China that cohort will drop by about 20% in the next 30 years.

The Philippines, one of the biggest labor-exporting countries in the world, where about 10% of the population is thought to work abroad, is also showing signs of reversing course to focus on domestic production. The country is increasing the amount of domestic contract work, such as call centers. The incoming amount of overseas remittances grew by over 7% year-on-year in the first half of the 2010s, but that slowed to 3% in 2018.

Some countries have already started trying to secure workers. Germany increased its acceptance of non-EU workers in 2020. In 2019, Australia increased the maximum length of working holidays from two years to three, on the condition that people work for a set period of time in sectors where there is a labor shortage, such as agriculture. Japan also is bringing in more foreign workers through the "specified skilled worker" system.

Economic forces may drive a new competition among nations for immigrants. One key is to become a "country of choice." "A policy of actively accepting immigrants means it is important to expand the options for foreign workers to settle and live in a country permanently," said Keizo Yamawaki, a professor at Meiji University in Tokyo who specializes in immigration policy.

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