1. Economic Growth in Bangladesh

This chapter explores the growth scenario of Bangladesh economy. This chapter attempts to examine the current state of economic growth of Bangladesh in terms of stability and analyse the conditions for transformability by looking at power, political settlement and institutions. It further scrutinises the conditions for environmentally sustainable growth that ascertains good quality of life of both humans and nature. It also inquires whether the claimed high rate of growth commensurate with the statistics on components of national income—consumption, savings, investment, expenditure and trade volumes—provided by the official sources such as Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics and other government agencies. Current economic growth of the country has been fuelled by RMG and remittance sector, both now showing negative growth rate. The Covid-19 pandemic has only exacerbated the current scenario. Political settlement has been used as a tool to demonstrate the clientelism that exists in the economy. Since there is global discussion on sustainable development goals (SDGs), this chapter also aims at assessing the progress of Bangladesh economy towards attaining SDGs. The chapter too draws on cross country analyses to show how the economic growth in Bangladesh has progressed compared to other countries.