It was intimated earlier that the course of future population trends is such that the question of an adequate supply of labour in the country will be of great concern in the future. The size of the labour force will depend primarily on changes in the size and age composition of the total population in the future. To some extent, changes in the age-specific labour force participation rates may affect the size of the population, but such changes in the future are extremely difficult to predict. Partly because of this, it is assumed that the participation rates will remain constant during the whole period of projection. What this implies is that the changes in the future labour force, to be discussed in this chapter, would be solely a reflection of the fertility trends assumed in our computation. This fits our objective well since our prime purpose is to demonstrate the impact of the different paths of fertility trends on the growth and structure of the labour force.

The total labour force at every five-year time-interval and the increase for every five-year period from 1985 onwards according to Projection A are presented in Table 6. The labour force is estimated to rise from 1,219,889 in 1985 to 1,300,200 in 1990, an increase of 80,311 or 6.6 per cent. In the next five year period 1990-95, the labour force is expected to increase by a small number of 54,500 or 4.2 per cent. The increase will continue to slacken until it amounts to only 6,400 or 0.4 per cent during 2010–15. By 2015 the labour force would have attained its peak level of 1,441,900, and thereafter it is expected to fluctuate slightly around the 1.4 million level with small negative growth rates at certain periods and small positive growth rates at others.

The figures for Projection B reveal that the labour force will follow a somewhat different but more clear-cut path in the future.