Budget 2026-27: Youth Recognised, But Jobs Still Missing!

This government more than most owes its place to the young. It was the country’s students and first-time workers who filled the streets and changed the political weather, and the first budget of the new era seems to know it. There is money this year for freelancers, whose income is now kept tax-free.

There is relief for start-ups, with the turnover tax on eligible firms brought down to zero. There is a dedicated push for the creative economy, and a separate Tk500 crore fund under the ICT division to draw new entrepreneurs, women and young founders among them.

Duties on laptops and other hardware have been trimmed. Read quickly, it looks like a budget that has finally turned to face its largest constituency.

Read slowly, the picture is more troubling. Speaking to the young is not the same as planning for them, and on the question that matters most to a 23-year-old leaving university this summer, namely where the job will come from, the budget offers warmth, where it needed a strategy.

Start with the shape of the problem it is answering because the official numbers are sharper than the speeches let on. By the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics’ own Labour Force Survey, close to two million young people aged 15 to 29 are unemployed. The detail that should trouble us most is who they are.

Among those jobless youth, the single largest group, around a third, are not the unschooled but the tertiary-educated. In Bangladesh a degree now raises, rather than lowers, the odds of sitting idle, because the certificates we hand out and the jobs the economy creates have drifted apart. No freelancing exemption reaches into that gap.

The measures on offer, welcome as they are, also reach a thin and already-fortunate slice. To gain from a freelancing exemption you must already be a freelancer with overseas clients and a bank account. To use a start-up concession, you must already have founded a company. To draw on an entrepreneurship fund you must already be the kind of young person who writes a business plan.

These are sound policies for those who have found a footing. They do little for the far larger number standing at the bottom of the ladder with no footing at all, and a budget that helps the first group while overlooking the second cannot quite call itself a youth budget.

“A demographic dividend is not a gift the young hand the nation. It is a deadline the nation must meet—and a window that is open today will not wait for the next finance bill to close.”

The deeper trouble is that jobs are not made by line items in a finance bill; they are made by investment, and investment is precisely what the wider economy is short of. Private investment has slipped to around 21.5% of GDP, its weakest in more than a decade, growth has fallen below 4%, and exports have contracted.

When the government then leans on domestic banks to finance its deficit, it competes for the very credit a small manufacturer in Gazipur would use to open a second line and take on 40 more hands. The young do not experience that crowding-out as a statistic. They meet it as a vacancy that was never advertised.

There is also the question of what kind of work we are preparing them for. Our employment story has rested on garments for 40 years, and the budget says little about the diversification, in light engineering, in agro-processing, in technology services beyond the freelance margin, that would create the next generation of jobs. The education allocation has risen sharply this year, and that deserves real credit, but allocation is not outcome.

A larger sum spent through the same examination-driven, certificate-chasing system will produce more certificates, not necessarily more employable people. The gap that needs closing is between the classroom and the workplace, and it is bridged by apprenticeships, by vocational training employers actually respect, and by a serious skills framework, none of which a spending figure alone can purchase.

To its credit, the government has put numbers to its hopes; a target of 200,000 new technology jobs each year, and some 500,000 more through the creative economy. Naming a target is the right instinct, and better than the vagueness of past budgets.

But a target is not yet a mechanism. It matters only if someone is counting the jobs each programme actually delivers and reporting the figure honestly, and on that machinery the budget stays quiet. It is easier to announce a fund than to build the unglamorous apparatus that turns public money into private hiring.

None of this demands a miracle in the government's first year. It asks for honesty about sequence. The young who carried this government into office were not promised a tax exemption; they were promised a country in which effort leads somewhere.

That promise is kept not in the glamorous corners of the budget but in the dull ones: in the power and roads that let factories run and expand, in the credit that reaches the firms that actually hire, in training matched to what employers need, and in a measured plan to move beyond a single export sector before the demographic clock runs down.

A budget is the plainest statement a government makes about whose future it is willing to fund. This one speaks kindly to the young, and after years of budgets that did not speak to them at all, that is not nothing. But kindness is not opportunity, and a generation that has already shown it can change a government will, before long, ask a harder question of it: not whether the budget mentioned us, but whether it employed us. That answer cannot be deferred to another June, because the young cannot defer growing older, and the window that stands open today will not wait for the next finance bill to close it.

The writer is a seasoned business journalist specialising in macroeconomics, banking policy, and international economic affairs. He can be reached at [email protected].