Charter of the Economy Intermediate 5.2 6.2 4.1 Degree& Post-Graduate 5.9 9.1 6.7 TOTAL 100.0 100.0 2.5 Average Years of Education 5.0 5.7 *The last Labor Force Survey by the PBS was in 2017-18. Source: LFS, PBS The education level distribution of the labor force is presented in Table 27.1. The share of illiterate workers is high at 40 percent in 2017-18. However, it has declined from over 46 percent in 2007-08. The good news is that the number of workers with degree education is expanding rapidly by almost 7 percent per annum. However, they still constitute only 9 percent of the labor force. Overall, the average education level(in years of schooling) has gone up from 5 years in 2007-08 to 5.7 years in 2017-18. The level of employment is estimated at 65.2 million in 2019-20 prior to the COVID-19 attack. This implies that the unemployment level had approached 5.5 million, implying an unemployment rate of 9 percent. Earlier, the last Labor Force Survey by the PBS in 2017­18 had estimated the unemployment rate at 5.8 percent. This corresponds to the‘open’ unemployment rate. There was substantial variation in the‘open’ unemployment rate among different types of workers in 2017-18. It was 5.1 percent in the Table 27.2: Unemployment Rate by Level of Education of Worker(%) 2007-08 2017-18 case of male workers while it was Illiterate 5.2 3.2 8.3 percent in the case of female Literate 4.9 7.5 workers. It was at the peak of over 10 percent for young workers aged up to 24 years. A perhaps surprising and worrying finding is that the rate of unemployment was higher for No formal education Pre-Matric Matric Intermediate 4.3 4.4 4.9 4.5 6.5 6.4 7.0 11.5 highly educated workers in 2017-18 Degree& Post-Graduate 4.9 16.3 as shown in Table 27.2 at over 16 OVERALL 5.2 5.8 percent. A decade ago, it was only 5 Source: LFS, PBS percent. The absorption of educated workers appears to hinge on the growth rate of the GDP. The year 2007-08 was preceded by four years of high growth of 6.6 percent annually. However, 2017-18 was a year of some recovery from four years of low growth of only 4.8 percent. Clearly, it is essential for the formal sector of the economy to expand rapidly for the relatively fast increase in jobs for educated workers entering the labor force. 282