THE ECONOMIC STRESS LEADING TO THE 36TH OF JULY

The economic reality that brought Bangladeshi students to the streets also made it a mass movement later on. The interim government must heed the spark that lit the fire

A MONG the different drivers underpinning the victorious students-mass movement in Bangladesh, the economic factors stand out on their own for a number of reasons. This is true both for why the students had launched the movement in the first place, and why the common people joined the students in the final phase in such overwhelmingly large numbers.

As is known, the student movement was triggered by the quota system concerning access to government jobs. The agenda acquired heightened importance in Bangladesh in recent years in the backdrop of an increasingly tight jobs market, particularly for the educated youth. Tension around access to jobs was, in fact, brewing for some time.

According to government data, about a third of Bangladesh's workforce is not in employment, education or training. And while the average unemployment rate is shown to be low, the unemployment rate among the educated youth is three times higher than the national average. There was a lot of frustration among the educated young because not enough jobs were being created in the economy. Private sector investment has stagnated at around 23-24 percent of the GDP over the past several years. Consequently, employment opportunities in the corporate and the formal sectors of the economy, where educated youth could be absorbed, were highly limited.