LAHORE: World Bank on Friday said Pakistan faces challenges at three fronts, which includes creations of jobs for rising workforce, providing more employment opportunities for women and improving access to jobs.
Due to rising fertility rates, Pakistan’s working-age population is set to grow by 2.1 per-cent a year for next ten years, said a World Bank report titled “Jobs and Entrepreneurship in Pakistan”.
As per the report, labour force participation is still very low, which was attributable to less representation of female labour force, which is 57 per-cent lesser than that of male counterparts and very low in urban areas, reported an English daily.
Growth-oriented entrepreneurship share remains low, said WB. The report added “while there is no perfect metric for defining growth entrepreneurship, only 1 per-cent of employed are employers i.e. those entrepreneurs who employed others.”
The report added women constitute 2 per-cent of all employees, a trivial share and only 14 per-cent of own-account workers. It mentioned the country’s formal private sector is still very small.  It added “Entry to the formal private sector appears to be limited, with just 4,830 new limited liability companies established in 2014. This corresponds to a rate of just 0.04 new companies per 100,000 people; the lowest among comparable countries.”
It mentioned obstacles remained in way of SME’s growth and data availability on private sector entities in the country was limited. WB report said available data provided a picture of substantial limitations for entrepreneurs in growing their businesses.
