A Pollyyannaish outlook
Shahid Alam asks who will clean up politics
In the Foreword to a monograph turned into a slender book, Can Bangladesh be a Middle Income Country Within a Decade?, Wahiduddin Mahmud makes these pertinent, as well as realistic, observations: "Bangladesh faces enormous challenges in alleviating poverty and achieving high, sustained and equitable economic growth. Nearly a third of its population lies under the official poverty line, and hunger and malnutrition are widespread. The country has to tackle several growth-retarding factors: poor governance and a high level of corruption, underdeveloped infrastructure, large-scale tax evasion and a low tax-GDP ratio, extremely high population density and the associated scarcity of land and natural resources, a low-skilled labour force, and vulnerability to natural disasters including the threat of the adverse effects of climate change." And proceeds to pose this profoundly probing query: "While the governance environment may have been barely adequate thus far to cope with an economy breaking out of stagnation and extreme poverty, are we nearing a tipping point beyond which it may increasingly prove a barrier to putting the economy firmly on a path of modernization and global integration?" It could very well be that the reader will find Mahmud's words the most thought-provoking in the entire book. The author, A.T. Rafiqur Rahman, a senior academic and development specialist, proclaims that he was driven to write the book after having witnessed Bangladesh's development initiatives in recent years, particularly for achieving higher economic growth while simultaneously reducing poverty. In his own words, he "focuses on the MIC status for Bangladesh under the World Bank ranking." The author is hooked on the idea that the coveted MIC (middle income country) status will allow Bangladesh to boost its self-confidence and earn other countries' respect as it will be able to shed the demeaning connotations associated with a low income country, a category to which it belongs. While some low income countries indeed carry "the image of midgets and panhandlers", as the author observes, so do more than a few MICs. It seems to be a trivial reason for a country wanting to be classified as a MIC, even though the elevated status might be bordering on the dividing line between low income and middle income classification. Furthermore, and Rahman acknowledges this caveat, the World Bank (WB) ranking might not tally with other evaluating institutions' assessments. The author studies the progression of five Asian countries (China, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam) and an equal number from other continents (Ghana, Guyana, Mauritania, Sudan, and Zambia) from low income to middle income status to speculate on an approximate timeframe when Bangladesh will be able to make the same transition. For the record, WB's 2011 report places Bangladesh, with a per capita GNI (gross national income) of US $770, firmly in the group of 36 low income economies. All countries with a GNI per capita of $1025 or lower are classified in the low income cluster. Of the South Asian countries classed as MICs, Sri Lanka has a GNI per capita of $2580, India 1410, and Pakistan 1120 (using the Atlas method). Based on his comparative study, Rahman concludes that Bangladesh can graduate to the MIC group by 2032. However, if the country can sustain the 6.7% of GDP growth that it achieved in 2011, it is likely that it could get there by 2018. And, at this point, he puts on particularly rose-tinted glasses: "There are high expectations that the strengths of the Bangladesh economy, including a confident private sector, growing improvements in education, skill training and other human development conditions, a dynamic youth group and an energetic and enlightened civil society sector, may be able to overcome the political tensions and conflicts and keep the country focused on economic and social growth." The only thing is that the dysfunctional political culture overwhelms the strengths of the country's economy, and the civil society is often a part of the debilitating hardened political partisanship characterizing the country. Then there are the sobering realities, some of which is beyond Bangladesh's control. The global economy is slowing down. Already WB has forecast a 0.4% reduction in GDP growth for the country in 2012 from the 2011 figure of 6.7%. India's has been cut down even more glaringly to 4.9% and China's to 7.8%. The interesting point about China is that it had itself set the rate at 7.5%! On a speculative point, is there any guarantee that, if and when (really more a matter of time) Bangladesh breaks past the benchmark of $1025, will WB shift the threshold of MIC to a higher level? Furthermore, it might not always be a good idea to draw on parallelism with the experiences of other countries to predict one nation's future. One might also question the wisdom of constantly checking with other countries to ascertain Bangladesh's situation. It is not necessarily a bad exercise; often, in fact, instructive, but a better option might be to concentrate on taking on and successfully completing one's own project, and not to always bother about what others are doing. The stark reality is that Bangladesh is considered to be a member of the least developed countries (LDC) by other international institutions, like the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) of the United Nations, using their own criteria to arrive at their conclusions. Using ECOSOC data, Nations Online has determined that Bangladesh and Bhutan (a country which, incidentally, is classified as a MIC by WB), along with eight other Asian nations, fall into the LDC group. The three criteria used to arrive at this conclusion are: (1) low income based on a 3-year average estimate of GNI per capita (under $750 for inclusion, above 900 for graduation); (2) human resource weakness based on nutrition, health, education, and adult literacy; and (3) economic vulnerability based on instability of agricultural production, instability of exports of goods and services, economic importance of non-traditional activities, merchandise export concentration, and handicap of economic smallness. There are different evaluators, but the inescapable fact is that, whoever it is, Bangladesh remains at the lower end of developing nations. Becoming an MIC would be wonderful, but should not become an obsession that loses sight of tackling serious social, economic and political issues that usually do not benefit from WB's panacea of growth, growth, and more growth. Bangladesh has performed relatively well in human development (although some of the reports in 2012 have not been encouraging), but, ECOSOC still classifies it among the LDCs because it is beset with some serious problems it needs to overcome. And it usually banks heavily on a single industry for its economic well-being when the chances are real that some factor could undermine it, and the country will find itself in a tight situation. We can be thankful for the inventiveness and adaptability of the average Bangladeshi to come up with remedial solutions. Rahman, thankfully, does not give a plethora of suggestions on how to hasten Bangladesh towards becoming an MIC because "offering a long list of suggestions from his past experience" has "limited usefulness". However, he has some puzzling observations, bordering on naiveté: "National leaders have good intentions for the country and convey the hopes and aspirations of the people when they talk about the development goals and plans for the country. But they have not been able to implement the necessary political, administrative and anti-corruption reforms…." Oh, really! And, pray, who is responsible for implementing the reforms? And for cleaning up the mess of dysfunctional politics? By the way, just who was responsible for creating the mess in the first place? Rahman does have one solution: bring back retired and retiring Bangladeshi expatriates in developed countries as well as the interested younger ones, but provide "a more professional environment and less partisan ways of work" for them. Of all the nakedly self-serving suggestions! Enough said. One would not lose much, if anything, by not having read Can Bangladesh be a Middle Income Country Within a Decade?
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