Suchergebnisse

Cover; Half Title; Title Page; Copyright Page; Table of Contents; List of figures; List of tables; List of annexes; List of contributors; Foreword; Preface; Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; 1 Bangladesh moving out of the LDC group: looking through the issues; Context; Key analytical issues; Smooth transition and structural transformation; Post-graduation challenges and opportunities; SDGs and smooth transition; The global and regional environment; Looking ahead; 2 The LDC paradigm, graduation and Bangladesh: concepts, comparison and policy; Introduction

Implementing Agenda 2030: Unpacking the Data Revolution at Country Level is a unique report that examines data availability and quality for tracking progress against the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The countries examined in this report, spanning four continents, are Bangladesh, Canada, Peru, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Turkey. The report examines data used to track progress in poverty, education, employment and inclusive growth, energy and infrastructure, environmental sustainability and disaster resilience, governance and global partnership. This report also offers a methodology and' tool kit' that can support policy-makers, development practitioners, academics and experts across the world, as they evaluate their national statistical situation and create count evel roadmaps for mainstreaming and monitoring SDGs. The volume demonstrates the advantages of providing more space to "Southern voices" in leading and shaping the global development agenda, as well as showcasing successful collaboration between think tanks from the South and the North.

This study takes a close look at the various dimensions of informality in Bangladesh from labour market and sectoral-enterprise perspectives. The specific issues examined include: the sectoral background of informal employment; reasons why informality is so persistent (push and pull factors); the formal and informal employment interface (including informal labour as a feature of the formal sector coexisting with formal employment); ownership patterns in the informal sector; earnings from formal and informal labour; the nature of the informal–formal continuum in value chains; sectoral distribution; gender divide and educational background; productivity, and issues of graduation from informal to formal employment. While some of these issues have been extensively studied in the context of south American developing countries (e.g. Perry et al., 2007), key issues demand more detailed examination and analysis in Bangladesh's context. Addressing issues related to informality is important for inclusive economic growth, which Bangladesh aspires to pursue in light of its Seventh Five Year Plan for the 2016–20 period and other key policy documents. Like many developing countries, Bangladesh is currently experiencing the so-called Lewis turning point, where labour moves from the agricultural sector to the rural non-farm and urban sectors. Indeed, a large part is being absorbed by the urban informal service sector, mostly in low-paying jobs. It is pertinent to note here that studies show that a 1% rise in agricultural income has the capacity to reduce poverty by 0.39% compared to 0.11% for non-agricultural income (Hossain et al., 2017). If these two trends are considered in tandem, the need for an in-depth study of the dynamics of Bangladesh's labour market, particularly focusing on informal employment and inclusiveness of the development process, is clear.

Bangladesh, like most of the countries in the world, had to restrict mobility and economic activities to tackle the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Indeed, the pandemic has been exerting pressure on the economy through both global and domestic shocks leading to a detrimental impact on major macroeconomic correlates of the country. The present study urges that Bangladesh will need to pursue a counter cyclical fiscal policy stance in the face of deceleration in aggregate demand. The study further maintains that greater fiscal resources should be directed towards those people, households and enterprises having a higher propensity to consume and invest. From this perspective, the study strongly advocates for direct cash transfers, food support, and enhanced public expenditures in health and education rather than a general increase in public expenditures and subsidised credit flow. Using Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model, the study presents ex-ante economic-wide impact analyses of two expansionary fiscal policy interventions. Doubling government transfers to low income household categories is expected to have a greater impact on the real consumption of poorer households. In contrast, a 50 per cent increase in government expenditure for health and education will have a greater positive impact on real GDP and export. In view of the trends of the last decade, the study concludes that it is not the lack of resources, rather the limited capacity of the government agencies which poses the major challenge in pursuing an expansionary fiscal policy in the country.

AbstractIt is often argued that strong macroeconomic fundamentals along with weak integration with international financial markets acted as major buffers for least developed countries (LDCs) against fallouts of the recent global financial and economic crisis. This paper examines the hypothesis that LDCs had strong macroeconomic fundamentals in the wake of the crisis by studying Impulse Response Functions (IRFs) of Gross Domestic Product per capita of the LDCs during the crisis. With the treatment of the crisis as a transmission of shocks and utilisation of IRFs, the paper finds substantial and rather persistent output and growth loss for LDCs because of fall in external demand and terms of trade shocks. With the forecast of the impacts of a potential 'double‐dip' recession on the LDCs by using Vector Autoregressive, the paper concludes that LDCs would require the greater part of the decade to recover which is lower than the earlier recovery period. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The authors review the available evidence regarding trend and structure of investment, employment and value added in Bangladesh manufacturing sector and identify the lacunas and limitations in the existing information base. They also present an independent estimate of investment and value-added in the Bangladesh manufacturing sector based on an enterprise level survey. (DÜI-Sen)