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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Tajikistan
Index
In 1991 some 1.95 million people were regularly employed outside the
home in Tajikistan. However, about 2.4 million Tajikistanis were
classified as being of working age. Of those who worked outside the home,
22 percent were employed in industry; 43 percent in agriculture; 18
percent in health care and social services; 6 percent in commerce, food
services, state procurement, and "material-technical supply and sales";
5 percent in transportation; 2 percent in the government bureaucracy; and
4 percent in miscellaneous services.
In the 1980s, light industry continued to employ the largest proportion
of industrial workers, 38.6 percent. The processing of food and livestock
feed employed an additional 11.7 percent. Machine building and
metal-working employed 19.7 percent. Three of Tajikistan's main areas of
heavy industrial development employed rather small proportions of the
industrial work force: chemicals and petrochemicals, 7.4 percent;
nonferrous metallurgy, 5.4 percent; and electric power, 2.4 percent.
One of the most serious economic problems in the late 1980s and early
1990s was unemployment. Unemployment and underemployment remained
extensive after the civil war, and the republic's high birth rate led
observers to predict that the number of unemployed people would continue
to grow through 2000. Tajikistan's designation in the Soviet economy as
primarily a producer of raw materials meant that until 1992 agriculture
was expected to provide the bulk of employment opportunities for the
population. However, the limited amount of arable land and the fast growth
of the rural population made further absorption of labor impossible by the
1990s (see Agriculture, this ch.). Although Tajikistan had the resources
to increase its production of consumer goods, Soviet economic planning did
not develop as much light industry in the republic as the human and
material resources could have supported. Two of Tajikistan's largest
industrial complexes, which produced chemicals and aluminum, were
capital-intensive and provided relatively few jobs.
Unemployment is a particular problem for the republic's young people.
Roughly three-quarters of the graduates of general education middle
schools (which most students attend) do not go on to further education
(see Education, this ch.). Upon entering the job market with such basic
qualifications, many cannot find employment. A disproportionate number of
young Tajikistanis enter low-paying manual jobs; in 1989 about 40 percent
of the agricultural labor force was below age thirty. By the end of the
Soviet era, however, a growing number of Tajikistan's young people could
not find employment even in agriculture. The paucity and low quality of
schools at the vocational level and higher schools prevented those
institutions from improving the employment prospects of large numbers of
potential workers. In the 1980s, a Soviet campaign to shift labor into "labor
deficit" regions in the European republics or in Siberia met with
vocal opposition.
With skilled workers leaving the country in the mid-1990s, industrial
and professional jobs, most notably in engineering, often go unfilled.
Shortages have been especially acute in light industry, construction,
health care, transportation, engineering, and education. The exodus of
qualified workers intensified in the early 1990s. In 1992 and 1993, an
estimated 123,000 specialists with higher education, mostly Russians, left
Tajikistan.
Data as of March 1996
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