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Research · Long-form
Source: BDPolicyLab narrative archive
Three explicit growth assumptions, their income implications and the policy choices to examine alongside them.
Every institutional score fell, the statistics with them, and the digital economy is a gender gap with a geography.
Sixty research chapters on Bangladesh’s economy, institutions and possible futures
A diaspora strategy needs an investment account
Disinflation has to reach the food budget
Labour rights need effective enforcement
Turning maritime rights into useful activity
Airports need a destination economy
From startup programmes to investment
Making data and cyber laws work
Credible statistics require visible methods
The institutions that make information credible
Digital land records need dependable ownership
Housing and services for metropolitan Dhaka
Giving local government the means to deliver
Justice beyond the case register
From new rules to a functioning state
Financing a prolonged Rohingya response
Managing unequal economic relationships
Preserving market access after graduation
Reserves, exchange rates and investor confidence
Debt service is the immediate constraint
The public enterprises behind the budget
Turning the tax base into collected revenue
Microfinance beyond the repayment cycle
Insurance that pays, pensions that accumulate
Making digital payments useful beyond cash transfer
Jobs now, support in later life
Making paid work possible for women
Social protection that holds its value
A research system beyond the credential
From school places to learning and work
Who pays for a longer life?
Cleaner air and better waste services need capable institutions
Protect coastal lives, livelihoods and assets
Water security depends on supply, quality and delivery
Renewable growth needs projects that can operate
Fuel security spans supply, efficiency and payment
Power capacity needs fuel, payment and effective dispatch
The next infrastructure task is performance and integration
Port capacity needs efficient connections and operations
Make formality worthwhile for firms and workers
Remittance resilience depends on channels and job quality
Services growth needs skills and reliable settlement
Pharmaceutical exports depend on regulatory capability
Diversification needs competitive inputs and room to grow
Garment growth depends on value retained
Food security includes affordability and dietary quality
Three conditional paths to 2036
Growing cities need workable land and service institutions
Connectivity needs to translate into productive use
Accountability and administrative capacity need separate reforms
Preparedness and long-term adaptation need sustained support
Infrastructure must deliver reliable, affordable service
Learning and affordable care must follow wider access
The demographic opportunity depends on better jobs
Payments have expanded faster than productive finance
Bank repair starts with recognising losses
Disinflation depends on credible monetary and fiscal policy
Public revenue limits the policy choices
A stronger external balance still needs durable financing
Graduation puts market access and implementation to the test
Growth depends on investment, prices and public revenue
One built-up ridge from Old Dhaka to Gazipur, and an urban share that reaches only 37 percent by 2036 on the last decade's pace.
Five consecutive years with a quarter of the country under water, falling mortality, rising exposure, and salinity rewriting coastal water.
Twenty nine percent of recoverable gas left, capacity payments on idle plants, and night lights that grew 141 percent.
Education and health spending against the peers, and where the arrears sit.
Ten million net new jobs needed by 2036, female participation in retreat, and a youth cohort meeting AI with fewer skills than the one before it.
Garments at 86.6 percent of goods exports, the EU at 52.4 percent, the November 2026 graduation clock, and the remittance map.
A classified loan ratio past 30 percent, three years of near double digit inflation, and a taka that lost 30 percent of its dollar value.
The growth record, the fiscal squeeze, and an interest bill that already takes a third of every taka of tax.
Watching Trade from Orbit: Border Queues, Anchorages, and Mirror Statistics
Migration earns foreign exchange for Bangladesh, yet workers finance the journey before the first wage arrives. A labour-export strategy that prices risk onto migrants is not efficient.
Bangladesh has plastic targets, but the baseline itself shows why an auditable material account must come first.
Bangladesh's e-GP system counts invitations, processing, and awards at scale. It still cannot tell citizens whether the contract delivered the promised service at the promised cost.
A cyclone shelter is also a school, a road connection, and an unfinished promise when construction misses its target.
Bangladesh funds research projects but does not publish a visible conversion path from award to replication, patent, product, procurement, or public benefit.
Bangladesh's reported road deaths and WHO's modeled burden answer different questions, and the distance between them is a policy failure.
Marine protection expanded while terrestrial coverage slipped, in one of the world's most densely settled deltas.
Container traffic more than doubled, yet Bangladesh paid almost six taka abroad for transport services for every taka it earned in FY2023-24. Handling cargo and capturing freight value are different industries.
Bangladesh's insurers held BDT 690.9 billion in assets in 2024, but insurance depth kept falling and claims settlement weakened. A thin trust industry cannot become a deep pool of patient capital.
Bangladesh has national heat evidence, but protection still depends on knowing who is hot, where, and when.
Food output rose, but current census tables do not show whether processors are graduating into scalable firms. Bangladesh must measure the middle before it can build it.
Bangladeshi firms financed 77.8% of fixed investment internally in 2022. The constraint is not a shortage of enterprise. It is a system that makes productive firms grow at the speed of retained earnings.
Bangladesh has expanded medical training, but the public workforce remains thin and urban-concentrated. The problem is deployment, retention, and team design, not only seats.
Bangladesh records a digital-services surplus but lacks firm-level evidence showing who graduates from cross-border work into durable export organizations.
Bangladesh improved death registration from a thin baseline, but its public evidence still does not show that every death and cause is counted. The missing record is a missing policy signal.
FAO's investment plan puts post-harvest losses at 25-50% in priority value chains and identifies a US$737 million cold-storage need. The missing asset is a reliable temperature-controlled market, not another production campaign.
Local governments face local problems with narrow, fragmented, and often earmarked money. Bangladesh cannot manage urban growth while keeping fiscal discretion at the centre.
Bangladesh has valued unpaid household production. The next test is whether budgets reduce the time cost carried overwhelmingly by women.
মাছ, বন্দর ও উপকূল এগিয়েছে। কিন্তু বিশ্বব্যাংকের যাচাইযোগ্য সমন্বিত সমুদ্র অর্থনীতি ধারা ২০১৪-১৫ অর্থবছরে থেমে আছে। সম্ভাবনার প্রথম অবকাঠামো তাই নতুন প্রকল্প নয়, একটি প্রকাশ্য মহাসাগর হিসাব।
Agriculture takes most measured freshwater withdrawals while renewable water per person keeps shrinking.
The census records a roof over almost every household, but floor and wall materials reveal a different standard of security.
The extension to 2029 has not been granted, and it comes with a rubric. Bank non-performing loans have more than tripled to 30.6% of gross loans, tax revenue has moved one percentage point in two decades, and 81.5% of goods exports are garments, half of them sold under a trade preference that ends at graduation.
Bangladesh grows cereals at 1.464 times the peer median yield and sits third of six on population hunger. Its under-fives are the most wasted and the most stunted of the four countries reporting.
Bangladeshi banks held capital worth 2.29% of assets in 2024, last of six Asian economies, while carrying non-performing loans of 9.57% of gross loans, the highest of the six. The lending side has already started to shrink.
Bangladesh used 287.8 kg of oil equivalent per person in 2023, the lowest energy use per person of six Asian economies and 29% of the peer median, while running the third-largest manufacturing sector in the group relative to GDP. Whether that number records efficiency or a ceiling is the question the data cannot settle.
Bangladesh generated 21.69% of its electricity from oil in 2023, the highest share of six Asian economies and thirteen times the peer median. It still delivers 602.9 kWh per person, fifth of the six. The expensive fuel is not buying abundance.
Bangladesh carries 1,319 people on every square kilometre, the densest of six Asian economies, and has already put 72.31% of its territory under agriculture, the largest share of the six. The extensive margin is finished. What remains is yield, fertiliser and water.
59% of Bangladeshi births had a skilled attendant in 2019, the lowest of the four countries reporting. The physician shortage is ordinary; the nursing and midwifery shortage is a factor of six.