Brunei Data 2009
How many of us realised that the population of Brunei in 2008 was around 398,000 just 2,000 short of the 400,000 population? 276,600 of those people are squeezed in the smallest district of Brunei-Muara and out of that number, 265,100 are Malays (Chinese made up 43,700), 105,300 are below the age of 20.More than 2,000 of us got married the year before with about 1,900 in front of a Jurunikah. We gave birth to more than 6,000 babies last year but more than 1,100 Bruneians also died last year.
Our unemployment rate last year was a reasonable 3.7%. Our GDP last year was more than $19,000 billion thus making each one of us having a per capita GDP of $49,800. That sounds large, doesn't it? But our growth rate last year was a mere 0.4% and our population grows by around 2.1% - this will mean our per capita GDP will become smaller in the future.
There are 110,000 of our young ones in school last year from kindergarten to universities taught by more than 9,300 teachers and lecturers.
Our people deposited some $12 billion in the banking system. Around $6 billion of these are kept by banks outside Brunei.
If you find all these data interesting, you can find all this and many more of these data from a small booklet issued by the JPKE or you can download the booklet yourself from HERE.
Comments
Maybe, just maybe, only 7,000 Bruneians really bothered to register officially with the Labour Department (but even Labour officials would tell you that in the Brunei Muara District alone slightly more than 6,000 people are unemployed but 2,000 more are still jobless in the Belait District. Probably a few hundred unemployed in the Tutong and Temburong districts respectively are still unaccounted for!)
I can safely assume that Bruneians aged between 18 and 54 who are desperately out of jobs (even self-employment could mean same thing) number about ten thousand.
Now, the best way to get to the bottom of registering the most accurate figure for unemployment is using the 'carrot and stick' approach i.e. His Majesty's Government has to fork out some BND2 million to make the jobless come out of their hiding by simply offering a once-off 'pilot living allowances scheme' of BND200 to each Bruneian who claim to be unemployed/jobless by officially registering with, say the Social Welfare Department in the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports. The two-million dollar budget could be specially allocated from the special 250 million dollar Human Resource Development Fund as announced by His Majesty some years back. ;) That is assuming there are only ten thousand unemployed Bruneians who are between 18 and 54 years old. So simple arithmetic calculation:
BND200 x 10,000 = BND2 000,000 (One-off unemployment benefit @ 200 dollars per jobless Bruneian i.e. assuming maximum figure of 10k ASAP!) No harm in giving it a go... call it "sedekah amal jariah Kerajaan Kebawah Duli Yang Maha Mulia Paduka Seri Begawan Sultan dan Yang Di-Pertuan Negara Brunei Darussalam", if you will. :) I mean if government civil servants are given "Elaun Kurnia Khas" monthly, the unemployed would be more than happy "Bersyukur Kehadrat Ilahi" if they were to be given two hundred dollars each even once in their lifetime... ;)
So should Brunei have a target, too?