High dependency ratios bring negative impacts to household living conditions — SIGI

AMMAN — Sisterhood is Global Institute (SIGI), a local women’s organisation, announced on Monday that the dependency ratio, a measure of the number of dependents (0-14 and above 65) in a household, has decreased in Jordan. 

Referring to Department of Statistics (DoS), SIGI said that “there is no doubt” that higher dependency ratios have negative impacts on the living conditions in households, as they often mean lower savings and higher expenditures to meet families' needs, according to a SIGI statement. 

SIGI also noted that the higher the dependency rates, the more unpaid care-related burdens, which usually fall on women. These burdens include the necessities of everyday life, such as cooking, cleaning and caring for children and the elderly.

All of these household chores are unpaid, where the tasks are not distributed equally between men and women, the latter shoulderingmost of these duties.

Household chores constitute "a serious obstacle" for women to secure paid jobs and also consume the majority of rest and leisure time, the statement added.

The unemployment survey for 2020 showed that the raw economic participation average stands at 22.3 per cent, which means that less than 25 per cent of the population is economically active.

The revised economic participation average stood at 34 per cent, which is low compared with other countries.

The unemployment rate in 2020 was 23.2 per cent, which means that there were some 559,590 male and female individuals without work, while the number of employed people stood at 1,852,435 individuals from both genders.