The budget for the fiscal 2007-08 coincides with a heavy down pour in the day of announcement, with a simmering heat wave during its preparation. The budget, economic manifestation of political mandate, lands in by a non-political government, in the backdrop of a chaos created by feuding political parties. It times up with G8 leaders’ heads in the sand of poverty, hegemony and protest at seaside summit in Germany. The budget keeps up with the continuity of liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation of successive governments.
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The paper exposes the fallacies of current debate on minimum wage and orthodox emphasis on ‘flexibility’ in labour market in Bangladesh. The paper amply demonstrates the necessity of national minimum wage at a level that ensures rights to live in dignity along with rights in work and rights to work in just and favourable conditions.
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The case study provides local people's perspective on ADB-GEF-Netherlands funded Sundarbans Biodiversity Conservation Project as Third Assembly of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) meets in the Cape Town, from 29-30 August 2006, to review GEF policies and operations. The project alienated symbiotic eco-system approach of human-animal-forest interdependence by creating artificial, alien and short term resource and livelihood systems for the local communities and indigenous people in the name of 'poverty reduction' and was unilaterally cancelled by the ADB, burdening the people of Bangladesh to pay back the loan for a flawed-designed project.
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The rapid assessment is divided into three parts. The first part locates the dynamics of fiscal measures to understand their implications on the process of national output expansion, which is the necessary condition for an economy to sustain in the coming years, especially in view of reduction of poverty. The second section analyses the budgetary allocation in light of the previous trends in order to find out as to where the resource are going. The final section attempts to understand the outcome of such exercise, particularly in light of claims in the field of millennium development goals (MDGs) which are prime target of the government, as stated in its poverty reduction strategy paper, which according to the government is her national strategy for development.
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This year's interim Bangladesh Public Policy Watch presents state of the economy in Bangladesh for last ten years (FY1996-97 to FY2005-06), with a view to stimulating public debate as the country progresses towards another election. In an acrimonious atmosphere too often loud with the clash of uniformed opinion and smug self-righteousness, Bangladesh Public Policy Watch, like its past two annual volumes, offers a rather old-fashioned contribution: evidence. To download the report save the link

This year's Bangladesh Public Policy Watch presents a reality check on the achievement of millennium development goals (MDGs) in Bangladesh. The timely theme provides an independent review of implementation vis-a-vis the commitments made in UN Millenium Declaration (MD) by the largest-ever gathering of Heads of State in 2000 as they again meet from September 14 to 16, 2005 to take decision on how the governments have lived up to their promises.
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The rhetoric of a special development package for the LDCs was aired in Hong Kong, with the assurance that the Ministerial would deliver on the promise of market access. The current study examine the effectiveness of the DFQF provided to the products of LDCs, by taking exportables of a single country to a single country market. For this purpose a trend analysis of Bangladesh exports into the US market has been conducted for last six years.
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The erosion of non-reciprocal preference, envisaged to result from the possible MFN liberalisation, has received least attention in the non-agricultural market access (NAMA) negotiations. The paper attempts to measure the extent of the erosion of preference Bangladesh may incur in the EU and USA market. The erosion of preference has been estimated in response to proposals made in NAMA negotiations. The impact estimated on the basis of traditional measure of preference erosion, which shows that the magnitude of erosion of preference to be faced by Bangladesh in the EU market as a result of MFN tariff cut is quite significant based upon the value of coefficients.
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The report attempts to understand the implications of multilateral agricultural liberalisation on food security situation of a net-food importing developing country.
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much benefit from the availed market access as her exports concentrated mainly on few products and very limited number of destinations. Apprehension is that many of the products under different tariff lines, in which she has export interests might be excluded from the market access - at least the US proclamation portends of such apprehension. The country could reap some benefit if she is capable enough to bargain with her bilateral counterparts to avail such facilities for some of the particular products, if not all, in which she has particular export interests. However, this requires a lot of ground work and, of course, it is inevitable to upgrade her negotiation skills. The final part of the report, thus, ends with some recommendations for the internal reflection and elements of strategy the LDCs may choose for their onward journey.
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