Myanmar›s challenge is to improve job quality to boost the well-being of employees and the workforce’s competitiveness. More than 90 percent of Myanmar›s jobs are currently low-productivity, low-paid, and in the agriculture sector, household enterprises or small firms. Recent economic reform has increased the contribution of the manufacturing and services sectors to GDP growth – at the expense of agriculture – although the share of workers employed in each sector has remained stagnant.

Much of the impact of jobs created will come from upgrading traditional sectors and increasing their productivity. Moreover, job creation in Myanmar is stronger in sectors linked to the global economy.

The report suggested that providing strategic support to the private sector would help create more quality jobs and Myanmar›s human capital strategy needs to be more tailored to the labour market demand. In addition, the country’s mobile workforce can be more successful with clearer migration channels.

A concerned, multi-dimensional policy effort – coordinated and enforced by a supra-ministerial person or body – is required to align the many stakeholders involved in the process of creating more, better and inclusive jobs.

Ten priority areas are defined in the report, including improving fiscal and monetary policies to create a more conducive macro-environment for job creation, creating a conducive legal environment for businesses and diversification, investing in jobs-friendly global value chains and developing agro-value chains to build up the rural micro and small enterprise sector.

Additionally, the cost of migration needs to be lowered and the productivity of household enterprises needs to be scaled up. The skills of the labour force should be upgraded and the skills should match the demand.

The report argued that job creation and jobs ought to be a policy priority for the Myanmar government, as economic growth and structural transformation have not resulted in substantive changes in the quantity of jobs in the country yet.

Myanmar has the ingredients necessary to create better jobs that are available to a larger share of the population: rapid economic growth, emerging industries, an emerging consumer class in Myanmar and in the wider region, more stable economic policies, and a large and mobile labour force.

As the Myanmar Sustainable Development Plan (MSDP) posits, having a jobs-centred development strategy will enable more and better jobs to emerge from these conditions than if job creation is left entirely to market forces to a growth-only strategy.

Source: https://www.mmtimes.com/news/myanmars-future-relies-more-jobs-and-better-jobs.html