Pakistan’s unemployment rate is lower than India’s and Turkey, showed latest data shared by the World of Statistics on Twitter.

Pakistan’s unemployment rate stood at 6.5% despite the country’s rising inflation and increase in the value of the dollar against the rupee. The country was ranked 16 on the world ranking.

The unemployment rate is the percentage of the labour force without a job. The rate fluctuates with changing economic conditions. When the economy is in poor shape and jobs are scarce, the unemployment rate can be expected to rise.

The country desperately needs the IMF funds to boost its economy, which is under pressure amid political and economic situation. The IMF funding is crucial for the $350 billion South Asian country.

The central bank’s foreign reserves have fallen as low as to cover barely a month of controlled imports. Pakistan’s economy has slowed, with an estimated 0.29% GDP growth for 2022-2023.

Recent research by Henna Ahsan and Muhammad Jehangir Khan of the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) showed that the gap between the rate of overall unemployment (6.3 per cent) and that of graduates (16.1pc) was almost 10-percentage-point wide.

The body used the employment data from 2001-02 to 2020-21.

“There are four major reasons for this trend; first a high disparity between the education offered and the need of the economy to accommodate these graduates. Second, a weak university-industry linkage, means that graduates being produced are not what is being demanded by the industry. Third, the increased number of people looking for jobs increases the labor force. Finally, the shrinking state of the economy; and macroeconomic imbalances,” said the research paper published in April.

The data showed that the unemployment rate for engineers increased from 11 per cent to 23.5 per cent which has doubled in just two years. Graduates of computer science and agriculture also faced a similar situation. But the unemployment rate within the medical discipline drastically increased by 68% in just two years.