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In spite of her one-fourth share of the combined GDP of 50 least developed countries (LDC), Bangladesh still lags behind many LDCs in some human development indicators including hunger.
However, the country is well ahead of many LDC members in some major areas like education, says a UN report, released here on Thursday.
Bangladesh has already achieved success in two of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) — gender equality in education and access to safe water and it is also progressing towards achieving the targets in two other areas — primary education and child mortality by 2015.
Revealing the facts, UNCTAD’s LDC report 2004 at the same time identified that Bangladesh’s progress in fighting hunger is still stagnant along with other 15 LDCs.
The report was formally launched globally on Thursday by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, focusing on linkage between international trade and poverty reduction.
The Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), a local research organisation, has presented the highlights of the report in Dhaka on behalf of the UNCTAD.
The report advocates for taking a development approach to make international trade work for poverty reduction.
“LDC governments can strengthen the links between international trade and poverty reduction by mainstreaming both trade and development into their poverty reduction strategies,” the report said.
Such strategies would base on three pillars: formulation and implementation of post-liberal development strategies within the LDCs, improvement in the international trade regime, including issues which go beyond the scope of WTO, and increasing international financial and technical assistance for enhancing trade capacity of the LDCs.
It also suggested increasing South-South cooperation in the field of trade and investment.
To make better use of international assistance for enhancing production and trade capacities in LDCs, the report identified three factors for the development partners of the LDCs that need to be addressed.
The three factors are commercial interests of developed countries, strengthening donors’ own capacities for trade-related assistance and elaboration of innovative approaches to private-sector development in the LDCs by the development partners.
Analysing the report, CPD research director Professor Mustafizur Rahman said that Bangladesh, Guinea and Uganda are the only three countries that saw virtuous effects of trade during the last decade.
Quoting the report, he said that relationship between international trade and poverty alleviation is ‘neither automatic nor straight forward’ as incremental activities in global trade gave rise to social discrimination in the LDCs and even in the rest of the world.
In this connection, Professor Mustafiz pointed out that agriculture sector of LDCs is far behind from benefiting from the global trade. That was why the UNCTAD report suggested that LDCs should have a balanced growth based on agricultural productivity and export-oriented industrialisation, he said.
The economist also said that export enhancement does not necessarily lead to poverty reduction, and trade liberalisation cannot help reduce poverty in countries where level of efficiency of investment is not adequate to support sustained economic growth.
He said that the on-going exercise to frame a poverty reduction strategy by the LDCs including Bangladesh have to be integrated with trade issues.
Taking part in the discussion, Debapriya Bhattacharya, executive director of the CPD said that Bangladesh alone shares almost one-forth of the total GDP of LDCs and the country’s performance in trade and global integration is also better than many other countries in the group.
But, at the same time, low performance in many areas of human development which is directly linked with income generation, left the country behind the expected level of progress.
CPD Chairman Professor Rehman Sobhan, research fellow Anannya Raihan and dialogue division head Fatema Yousuf were also present at the launching ceremony held at the CPD office.