It had to come sometime. The major international financial organizations, like the World Bank and the IMF, have long lauded the successful moves of the stewards of Bangladesh’s economy. Now Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has taken credit for that stewardship.
She made the claim during Governor of Oregon Ted Kulongoski’s visit to Bangladesh. I suppose it doesn’t matter that much of the ground-work behind the apparently successful macro-economic moves were already systemic to the basic structure of the country’s economy before Sheikh Hasina swept back into power in December 2008. That remittances and export manufacturing led growth helped buoy the economy during the 2008 global economic downturn doesn’t jibe with the narrative that she wants to draw. It may not help her cause then to think, as I do, that her great accomplishment was to not apply ideologically built brakes on the normal and healthy functioning of the economy.
Nevertheless, she is surely right that she has drawn up an education policy that better fits the needs of the 21st century global labor market than the education system that now governs the chances of a well-constructed and productive life for millions of young Bangladeshis. She is right to think that the policies she has chosen to draw closer together both India and China, moves that will allow Bangladesh greater utilities and export manufacturing capacity,will yield better opportunities and greater welfare for all Bangladeshis.
Moreover, Sheikh Hasina claimed that under her leadership bilateral relations with the United States will increase. It is not insignificant, of course, that she made the claim in the company of Governor Kulongoski,who had come to Dhaka under the auspices of the State Partnership Program, the National Guards broader international defense and training outreach program. It seems the Oregon National Guard might well help train the Bangladesh Armed Forces. No doubt this will doubly affect military recruitment and earnings through the United Nations Peacekeeping Operation.
These are all political moves that should be applauded, laudable moves that all Bangladeshis should proclaim with fanfare. However, that does not imply that she or her government helped steer Bangladesh’s economy past the rocky rapids of the currents of the Great Recession.
