Perspective Plan

To see Bangladeshi people healthier, happier and economically productive to make the country a middle income country by 2021, despite many challenges to overcome, based on impressive gains achieved in health outcomes in past together with further consolidation of past efforts, new and innovative strategies need to pursue; doing more of the same may not be effective, rather exploration of new ways of doing business is the demand.

South-South cooperation is initiated, organized and managed by developing countries themselves; often, Governments play a lead role, with active participation from public- and private-sector institutions, non-governmental organizations and individuals. It involves different and evolving forms, including sharing of knowledge and experience, training, technology transfer, financial and monetary cooperation and in-kind contributions.

This tracer study is part of 7th Five Year Plan background study series. It focuses on the implementation of Digital Bangladesh vision. The document reviews the progress made in this regard during the 6th Five Year Plan period and recommends specific priorities as well as recommendations to be considered for 7th Five Year Plan.

The purpose of this paper is to (i) make an objective assessment of the nature of performance of the agriculture sector during the 6th Plan period, (ii) identify the factors contributing to the nature of performance, (iii) identify the opportunities and challenges for the future, especially for the 7th Plan period and (iv) propose policies and strategies to address the challenges and opportunities.

The present paper reviews progress on gender equality under the SFYP, recommends priority issues to be addressed, and suggests strategies for consideration while preparing the 7FYP. Section 2 of the report sets the situation of Bangladesh within the current global and Asia-Pacific regional context. Section 3 reviews the progress of the SFYP in line with the strategy for gender equality and women’s empowerment and Section 4 provides an analysis of the challenges and limitation of achieving the targets of the SFYP.

Most of the papers concentrating on the regional disparity of Bangladesh have analyzed the hypothesis of inequality from the perspective of greater districts. Either they took East and West as two broad districts or the comparison has been made among the seven divisions of Bangladesh. This approach actually misses the relative micro picture of the economy which is essential to address the lagging districts more precisely. It has been seen in recent data that some districts in the west have done better than to that of some districts in the east. For that reason this paper will analyze the whole issue from the district level development.

The purpose of this paper is to review progress of the detailed dimensions of food security under the 6th Five Year Plan and set the food security goal, objectives, targets and implementation strategy under the new 7th Five Year Plan (FYP). Attempt is also made to make an outline of the new National Food Policy, to be aligned with the 7th FYP, in line with the terms of reference for preparing the paper.

The 7th Five Year Plan offers a unique opportunity to build a fresh approach to the decentralization and local governance agenda for Bangladesh. At one level, there will have to be a large and obvious element of continuity of priorities from earlier planning documents. At another level, however, there is an opportunity for re-thinking that lies in factoring in the new realities and challenges and thereby engage all relevant stakeholders in a compelling process of re-thinking on why and how decentralization and local governance is critical to ensuring Bangladesh’s ambitions of inclusive prosperity

The purpose of this paper is to provide guidance to the 7th Five Year Plan (FYP) on governance, including justice. Governance has become as a major public priority in Bangladesh. Strengthening the institutional framework for sustainable development at all levels has emerged as one of the crucial areas to be addressed in the 7th FYP.

The objective of the study is to explore environmental sustainability activities, review past policies, strategies & plans, asses Bangladesh’s stance with regard to MEAs, review the priorities outlined in the 6FYP, analyze progress towards the targeted benchmarks, review achievement/ failures of national sustainable development strategies, governance issues etc with a view to ensure inclusive and equitable economic growth and environment, forestry and biodiversity conservation.

The Government of Bangladesh has initiated the process of formulating its Seventh Five Year Plan for the period 2016-2020. A total of 28 background papers, mostly sector-specific, have been identified – each of which will be completed as inputs towards formulating the Plan. The GOB recognizes that the country is highly prone to a variety of hazards and her disaster risk reduction needs are amongst the highest in the world. Moreover, the country and its poor people are most likely to be severely affected by global climate change, which in turn will exacerbate hazard related adverse impacts. As per GOB decision, a paper on climate change and disaster risk reduction is perceived to provide insight into the GOB’s current state of preparation, delivery of services, gaps between needs and services being provided, and future directions to avoid major adverse implications of both climate change and disaster risk reduction.

The World Economic Forum regularly updates countries position on competitiveness based on 12 pillars. Infrastructure (transport and energy infrastructure) is a key pillar for economies like Bangladesh. Comparison of infrastructure among developing Asian countries shows that despite progress Bangladesh is still substantially deficient in terms of the quality of infrastructure in regards to all the countries shown in Table 1 except Myanmar. The gap in infrastructure quality is especially large when compared with Thailand, China, India and Sri Lanka. So Bangladesh needs to bring more focus to the efficient implementation of infrastructure investments along with necessary institutional changes relating to implementation, regulation, and policy formulation.

The financial sector is a vital part of an economy because of the role it plays in intermediating savings of the private and public sector to productive activities including investment. Bangladesh financial system is dominated by the banking sector, which fundamentally depends on short- and medium-term deposits for financing their lending portfolios. This limits availability of funds that would be required for long-term investments like infrastructure and housing. Bangladesh has a capital market, with its known difficulties, and there is no vibrant secondary market for bonds, which limits the availability of resources for infrastructure financing. This paper starts with a general overview of the current structure of the financial system in Bangladesh in terms of the 4 key markets—money market comprising banks, microfinance institutions and nonbank financial institutions, stock market, bond market and insurance market--and their sizes, relationships between the various markets and the associated regulatory bodies assigned to govern the different market segments.

Bangladesh despite being a least developed economy has had a relatively strong track record of prudent fiscal management and has made some progress in revenue mobilization efforts in the last decade. Good fiscal management in terms of keeping the fiscal deficit and public debt at sustainable levels, despite limited public sector resource mobilization, has served as the anchor to Bangladesh’s continued macroeconomic stability. The good fiscal management notwithstanding, public sector service delivery in terms of coverage and quality were seriously constrained by the limited success in resource mobilization.

Leveraging the global demand for commodities as well as services through export-oriented development should then be a strategic goal for the Bangladesh economy in its quest to achieve middle income status by 2021. Bangladesh’s export performance so far presents signs of strength as well as weakness in its export basket. Export concentration has emerged as a formidable challenge to address and overcome.

Since independence Bangladesh has been experiencing a steady increase in the growth rate of real GDP, accelerating from an average of less than 4% per year during 1974-1990 to 6.4% in 2010-13 . This is a remarkable performance, even after allowing for the low initial base. Importantly, this performance is still below true potential, which gives hope that with a stronger performance Bangladesh can expect to attain middle income status by the year 2021 as envisioned in the Government’s Vision 2021 and the 20 year Perspective Plan (Government of Bangladesh, 2011a).

The tourism industry has emerged as a major income-driving industry in many developing/middle-income countries in the world. There is a plethora of literature and studies that show the positive a thriving tourism sector can have positive impact on economic growth and development of countries. Bangladesh is blessed with natural beauty, ranging from mountains to rivers to beaches to bio-diversity. It boasts the longest natural beach in the world in Cox’s Bazaar as well as the largest mangrove forest in the world at the Sundarbans.

For efficient and appropriate land management system, maintenance of updated land ROR is very important. To address the inefficiencies involved, it is important to integrate all ownership information and allow all related agencies to share the same up-to-date information. To improve the land administration and management system, there are various solutions as suggested by stakeholders. While some of the solutions appear to be long-term by nature, some are short term. It is not possible to change the current administrative structure overnight to solve all the problems considering various difficulties involved with it. Rather, an IT solution can be sought to integrate the system and allow easy and quick fix of problems.

Education has multiple effects—both economic and non-economic. The well-known noneconomic effects relate to health, nutrition, and social cohesion. Better educated population has lower child poverty, lower child and maternal under-nutrition, higher female agency and empowerment. The present paper is about economic effects of education. Encouraging upward economic mobility through deliberate accumulation of educational human capital often spanned over inter-generational frame of reference--while ensuring quality education for all--is one sure time-tested way of fighting the “injustice of poverty” (Galor and Zeira 1993; Sobhan 2011).