Employment Aspects of Industrial Growth in West Pakistan

Employment has been one of the major explicit objectives of all development plans in Pakistan. The Third Five Year Plan estimated [3] that at least 255,000 additional employment opportunities would be created in West Pakistan in large-scale manufacturing sector. Although complete reliance on the date reported about employment in the C.M.I, is not recommended, the orders of magnitude can easily be seen. It appears from the statistics available that employment in this sector has increased by approximately 90,000-100,000 only during these eight years. The average annual rate of growth of employment between 1954-1959/60 was 16.8%, slightly higher than 15.6% annual rate of output growth but this rate declined to 3.1 % between 1959/60 and 1967/68 while output at factor cost rose by about 11.4%. The output elasticity of demand for labour thus works out to be 0.27 for this period. Implicit in these growth rates is the fact that labour productivity was increasing at an average of 8 % per year.