Population growth and employment

IT is great that our prime minister is in ‘search of job’; and of course he is right that job creation lies in investment in the private sector.
The public sector is in the process of cutting back as we cannot afford all the public servants that we currently have.
But the PM does not mention at all the root cause of the problem for PNG at the moment regarding young people, educated people, university graduates, etc, and getting jobs. The cause is the population growth rate.
We are currently increasing our population by 3 per cent per annum; the total fertility rate is still more than 4 per cent (i.e. women are on average having more than four kids each).
This has the effect of doubling our population every generation (25-27 years), and means that the age structure of our population is such that more than half the population is less than 18 years old.
With the above demographic parameters, it does not matter how much private investment there is, we will never catch up the burgeoning population of young people entering adulthood, many of them leaving school, college, university, tech school, TAFE, etc, and looking for a job.
In the last analysis of university graduates several years ago, it was found that only 20 per cent of graduates could find a job within two years of graduation (we need to do this study again and also survey tech, TAFE and college leavers as well). I think the figures today might be worse.
Hand-in-hand with investment and economic development, there has to be social development and population planning.
No country in the world has achieved high-income country (HIC) status with a total fertility rate (TFR) of more than three.
The countries which were recently classified as ‘developing’ and have now achieved HIC status have all reduced their TFRs from 4+ to between two and three.
Can the Government please start addressing its published National PopulationPolicy so that PNG can have a chance of being a developed country for our grandchildren?
We must address both sides of the equation. It is not just jobs.
It is also the numbers of young people looking for jobs that we have to plan for in the medium to longer term.

Professor Glen Liddell Mola