Bangladesh's Long-Run Macro Record

The Global Macro Database (Müller, Xu, Lehbib & Chen 2025) integrates 160 historical and contemporary sources into continuous annual series for 239 economies. For Bangladesh the coverage reaches back to 1800 for population and to the 1950s for prices and output, which makes it the longest internally consistent macro record available for the country in one place. Real GDP per capita was 2,282 constant US dollars in 2024, 4.5 times its 1959 level of 509 dollars. CPI inflation peaked at 54.7 percent in 1974; the 2024 rate was 10.5 percent. Population grew from 18.5 million in 1800 to 173.1 million in 2024.

What the long series show

The per-capita income series is flat for its first two decades, then bends upward after the 1990s trade liberalization and accelerates from the mid-2000s: the classic late-industrializer shape, compressed into one generation. The inflation series carries the 1974 famine-year price shock as its extreme, followed by disinflation into the single digits that has held, with episodes, since the 1980s. Government debt climbs from roughly 10 percent of GDP in the mid-1970s to 41 percent by 2024, a slow accumulation over five decades, and the overall deficit never exceeds 6 percent of GDP anywhere in the series: fiscal conservatism is the long-run norm, not a recent achievement. Trade openness roughly triples from about 13 percent of GDP in the early 1970s to its 43 percent peak in 2011 before drifting down to 27 percent by 2024, a decline that predates the 2022 import-compression episode.

Crisis chronology

The database codes 1 banking crisis year (1987) and 1 currency crisis year (1976) for Bangladesh through 2024, and no sovereign default. The 1987 banking entry corresponds to the loan-recovery crisis of the nationalized commercial banks; the 1976 currency entry to the sharp mid-1970s depreciation of the taka. That both lists are short is itself the finding: the macro record's stability contrasts with the banking system's chronic asset-quality problem, which never tipped into a systemic run after 1987.

How to read this against the standard sources

These series are harmonized from the same primary statistics the IMF WEO and World Bank WDI carry, but splice historical sources those databases drop. Where they overlap, prefer the primary source for the latest observation and the GMD for the long view. All 25 Bangladesh series are in the BDPolicyLab data lake under the gmd_ prefix and served by the lake API.