Peer Benchmark

Bangladesh Against Its Peers

Bottom line: on the indicators that decide whether an economy can absorb preference loss, Bangladesh sits in the lower half of its own comparator set. Across 10 same-year comparisons against India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Thailand and Vietnam, Bangladesh's median rank is 4.0 of six. It ranks best on 0 (none) and last on 1 (employment in agriculture).

Every comparison here is pinned to the same calendar year for all six countries. That restraint matters: peers report on different schedules, and ranking each country on its own latest observation measures reporting lag as much as performance. Where fewer than three peers published in Bangladesh's latest year, the row is shown but deliberately left unranked rather than ranked against a thin field.

Vietnam Is the Relevant Comparison

Vietnam is the country the graduation debate keeps invoking, and it is ahead of Bangladesh on 8 of the 11 indicators compared here. The gap is not a mystery of culture or luck. It is visible in the accumulation rows: investment, savings and private credit are what fund a transition out of preference-dependent exporting, and they are the rows where a shortfall compounds rather than corrects.

What This Does and Does Not Say

It does not say Bangladesh is failing. Several of these indicators have improved faster here than in the comparator set, and a rank is a snapshot, not a trajectory. What it says is narrower and harder to argue with: on the day preferences change, the buffer available is the one measured in these levels, not in the rate of improvement that preceded them.

No composite score is published, and none should be. Averaging investment, youth unemployment and dependency into a single index would let a strong row conceal a weak one, and the weak ones here are the binding ones.

What Would Change the Ranking

1. Treat the accumulation rows as the target, not the symptom. Investment and savings shares are the constraint that sets how fast every other row can move. A diversification strategy that does not raise them is a sequencing plan without a financing plan.

2. Report these comparisons every time a graduation claim is made. The figures are computed from data already held; publishing them alongside domestic progress numbers makes the standard explicit rather than implicit.

3. Watch the employment-quality rows during the shock, not after. Vulnerable employment and youth unemployment are where a preference loss that lands on export manufacturing will show up first, and both are monthly-to-annual indicators that can be tracked as it happens rather than reconstructed later.