Bangladesh has been ‘fantastically successful’

An eminent development economist has termed the more than five decades of development journey of Bangladesh as a ‘fantastically successful’ despite its terrible political leadership. 

In a long interview with the Financial Times (FT) regarding the success of developed and developing nations, Sir Paul Collier, referred Bangladesh as a great example of advancement from the bottom. 

“My favourite example of bottom-up is Bangladesh” he told FT. “If we go back to 1971, it was the epicentre of global poverty. Now it’s just on the cusp of middle income.”

“It’s been fantastically successful,” added the professor at the Blavatnik School of Government in UK. “And political leadership in Bangladesh has been terrible throughout.”

Paul was of the view that the bottom-up in Bangladesh is world famous. 

“It’s BRAC, which is the biggest NGO in the world. It’s [social entrepreneur] Muhammad Yunus. It’s a bottom-up movement, which is functioning with these amazing NGOs,” he continued. 

Terming the just spawned Youth Policy Forum as ‘a marvellous NGO,’ he added that it is growing very fast.  

“It is trying to create a cadre of young, Bangladeshi civil servants who are learning from examples elsewhere,” said Paul. “That’s so exciting because the vital characteristic of a society trying to catch up is the capacity to learn fast.”

The economist was of the view that we learn from others where possible and we also learn by trying things out — from failures as well as from successes. 

“But we need experiments in parallel,” he added.

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