QUEST FOR A FAIRER BANGLADESH-INDEPENDENT-04-01-2013
User Rating:
/ 0
PoorBest
/ 0PoorBest
Friday, 04
January 2013
Author /
Source: Kazi Anwarul Masud
Often
political parties come to blows to take over responsibility of governance (
assuming their real aim is not to capture power) while the stated objective is
to serve the people through a process of free and uncoerced agreement.
Examples are replete of incidents of violence and civil wars waged in different parts of the world to capture power that more often than not end in plundering capitalism and kleptocracy. Given the fact that all societies must harbour people of different faiths and opinions and these people must band together to give expression to their common belief political parties must therefore exist in pluralistic societies . As societies became complex and number of people grew Periclian democracy had to give way gradually to what we call democracy with elections being an integral part of the democratic process.
In developed industrialized countries elections are fought through communicating with the voters. In many of the developing countries elections are fought on the strength of money( developed countries are no exceptions) and muscle( bought with money).
The eagerness to “serve” the people at any cost raises question in the mindS of many about the real intentions of politicians and given the information made available by reputed organizations (e.g. Transparency International) on mal-governance by the parties in power suspicions about the intentions of the political parties are understandable. If such a situation has to be accepted as a constant in our society then people have to grapple with the question as to how much corruption regresses economic development. Transparency International Bangladesh in its latest report revealed that in the last fiscal year officials in government and non-government sectors have taken bribes amounting to Taka 22000 crores accounting for 2.8 and 13.6 per cent of the country’s GDP and national budget respectively. TIB reports are controversial and generally not accepted by the party in power. Perception of the people shaped by the shadow of the reports , however, lingers on. The country’s GDP growth is 6% (as the World Bank report indicates) and in linear term three per cent growth is lost due to corruption.
As corruption in varying degrees is an universal phenomenon one may wish to explore how to accelerate the pace of development to make up for the loss yet continue efforts to reduce corruption.
Impediments to developments are many. Yet the World Bank in its latest report has painted a positive picture of Bangladesh for the coming years. World Bank’s optimism is based on the facts that “in spite of global shocks and natural crises, Bangladesh’s economy has maintained a healthy 6%-plus growth rate in past years and significantly reduced the number of absolute poor.
Bangladesh now needs to accelerate GDP growth to 7.5% to 8% and sustain 8% remittance growth to reach its aspiration of middle-income country status by next decade. The distribution of economic opportunities across all population groups, and particularly those at the bottom, needs to improve in order to make middle-income country status meaningful…..
Acceleration of growth also helped 15 million people leave absolute poverty behind in the past three decades. The country’s remarkably steady growth was possible due to a number of factors including population control, financial deepening, macroeconomic stability, and openness in the economy”. IMF’s October 2012 World Economic Outlook puts Bangladesh among the top 30 countries out of 150 surveyed due to both external and internal factors. Interestingly an article published by The Guardian( 18th December 2012) referred to Jim O’ Neill’s (of Goldman Sachs) identification of next 11 countries as successor to BRIC that includes Bangladesh.
The projection of John Hawksworth, Chief Economist of Price Water House is that “Some of these emerging countries have good demographics, based on a growing and younger population than countries in the west. They have a lot of potential for catch-up as long as they have broadly growth-friendly policies – a big if in some cases. They have the potential to absorb technology from overseas and can get rapid growth. It doesn't mean all will achieve it but a fair few will." The Guardian projects that some of these countries may even overtake the recession-ridden West by 2050 as “they are big. They have young and growing populations. They have invested in infrastructure and education. And they are growing at the sort of rates that make them the envy of the recession-hobbled West”.
Evidently the report has considered demographic dividends that some countries with large workforce and comparatively tolerable number of retirees are expected to do well. But it presupposes skilled workforce that will enhance productivity. Proper education in areas of interest to the private and public sectors would be essential.
The World Bank cautions that most developing countries have a short window of opportunity to enact policies and promote investments that raise the human capital of young people while positioning them for greater economic productivity when they enter their working years. Demography need not be destiny, but failure of leadership to manage demographic change will guarantee lags in economic growth and increase the risk of social and political turbulence Exhilarating though the Guardian report is these are rare as the series of critical reports published by The Economist would testify.
But nonetheless such reports demonstrate how much we have developed from Henry Kissinger’s dismissal of Bangladesh as an international basket case. It is, however, difficult to grab the factuality of such projections as we are yet far from Clay Shirkey’s Cognitive Surplus where television’s passive consumers are transformed into active producers and sharers of interactive media.
Shirkey points out that there are now 2 billion people online across the world, and more than 3 billion with mobile phones. Given that there are around 4.5 billion adults worldwide, Shirky writes "we live, for the first time in history, in a world where being part of a globally interconnected group is the normal case for most citizens". With this many people involved, the collective leverage that can be brought to bear on any particular project or problem is colossal. But then this may be true for the US and the West. The present government’s aim to digitalize Bangladesh is praiseworthy. But poverty and illiteracy, among other factors, are likely to stand in the way of reaping the benefits of Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus.
While case may be made for relatively rapid development of Bangladesh despite constraints if proper policies are followed the problem of equitable distribution of the fruits of developments will have to be addressed.
Digitalization and mechanization will inevitably mean replacement of manual labour—a difficult decision for political leaders to make in a populous country like ours.
As Nobel laureate Paul Krugman wrote in a recent piece in The New York Times ( December 27 2012) “if income inequality continues to soar, we’re looking at a dystopian, class-warfare future — not the kind of thing government agencies want to contemplate”.
Paul Krugman was referring to the US and not Bangladesh. But then uneven distribution of national wealth is extant in Communist China as it is in democratic India. Gini coefficient that measures the distribution of income among individuals or households that deviates from a perfectly equal distribution in an economy has been growing from 0.39 in 1983/84 to 0.46 in 2010 causing concern among many people.
According to Policy Research Institute another dimension of the inequality problem is provided by the respective income shares of the bottom and top 5 percentile of the population. The income share of the bottom 5 percent of the population fell from 1.2 percent in 1983/84 to less than 1% in 2010. In comparison, the income share of the top 5 percent has grown from 18.3 percent to about 25% over the same period. In addition to the adverse implications for poverty reduction effort, the growing concentration of income presents a social challenge of relative deprivation. Even if one has to accept a degree of injustice one has to conform to Rawlsian proposition that inequalities in society must be organized so that they are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.
Rawls explains “To say that inequalities in income and wealth are to be arranged for the greatest benefit of the least advantaged simply means that we are to compare schemes of cooperation by seeing how well off the least advantaged are under each scheme, and then to select the scheme under which the least advantaged are better off than they are under any other scheme.”
With two competing arrangements of incomes in a society, the fairer of the two – and therefore the more just of the two – is the one that is to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. Perhaps our leaders may wish to take up the struggle for justice and for a fairer Bangladesh instead of “serving” the people from the top.
The writer is a former Secretary and ambassador
Examples are replete of incidents of violence and civil wars waged in different parts of the world to capture power that more often than not end in plundering capitalism and kleptocracy. Given the fact that all societies must harbour people of different faiths and opinions and these people must band together to give expression to their common belief political parties must therefore exist in pluralistic societies . As societies became complex and number of people grew Periclian democracy had to give way gradually to what we call democracy with elections being an integral part of the democratic process.
In developed industrialized countries elections are fought through communicating with the voters. In many of the developing countries elections are fought on the strength of money( developed countries are no exceptions) and muscle( bought with money).
The eagerness to “serve” the people at any cost raises question in the mindS of many about the real intentions of politicians and given the information made available by reputed organizations (e.g. Transparency International) on mal-governance by the parties in power suspicions about the intentions of the political parties are understandable. If such a situation has to be accepted as a constant in our society then people have to grapple with the question as to how much corruption regresses economic development. Transparency International Bangladesh in its latest report revealed that in the last fiscal year officials in government and non-government sectors have taken bribes amounting to Taka 22000 crores accounting for 2.8 and 13.6 per cent of the country’s GDP and national budget respectively. TIB reports are controversial and generally not accepted by the party in power. Perception of the people shaped by the shadow of the reports , however, lingers on. The country’s GDP growth is 6% (as the World Bank report indicates) and in linear term three per cent growth is lost due to corruption.
As corruption in varying degrees is an universal phenomenon one may wish to explore how to accelerate the pace of development to make up for the loss yet continue efforts to reduce corruption.
Impediments to developments are many. Yet the World Bank in its latest report has painted a positive picture of Bangladesh for the coming years. World Bank’s optimism is based on the facts that “in spite of global shocks and natural crises, Bangladesh’s economy has maintained a healthy 6%-plus growth rate in past years and significantly reduced the number of absolute poor.
Bangladesh now needs to accelerate GDP growth to 7.5% to 8% and sustain 8% remittance growth to reach its aspiration of middle-income country status by next decade. The distribution of economic opportunities across all population groups, and particularly those at the bottom, needs to improve in order to make middle-income country status meaningful…..
Acceleration of growth also helped 15 million people leave absolute poverty behind in the past three decades. The country’s remarkably steady growth was possible due to a number of factors including population control, financial deepening, macroeconomic stability, and openness in the economy”. IMF’s October 2012 World Economic Outlook puts Bangladesh among the top 30 countries out of 150 surveyed due to both external and internal factors. Interestingly an article published by The Guardian( 18th December 2012) referred to Jim O’ Neill’s (of Goldman Sachs) identification of next 11 countries as successor to BRIC that includes Bangladesh.
The projection of John Hawksworth, Chief Economist of Price Water House is that “Some of these emerging countries have good demographics, based on a growing and younger population than countries in the west. They have a lot of potential for catch-up as long as they have broadly growth-friendly policies – a big if in some cases. They have the potential to absorb technology from overseas and can get rapid growth. It doesn't mean all will achieve it but a fair few will." The Guardian projects that some of these countries may even overtake the recession-ridden West by 2050 as “they are big. They have young and growing populations. They have invested in infrastructure and education. And they are growing at the sort of rates that make them the envy of the recession-hobbled West”.
Evidently the report has considered demographic dividends that some countries with large workforce and comparatively tolerable number of retirees are expected to do well. But it presupposes skilled workforce that will enhance productivity. Proper education in areas of interest to the private and public sectors would be essential.
The World Bank cautions that most developing countries have a short window of opportunity to enact policies and promote investments that raise the human capital of young people while positioning them for greater economic productivity when they enter their working years. Demography need not be destiny, but failure of leadership to manage demographic change will guarantee lags in economic growth and increase the risk of social and political turbulence Exhilarating though the Guardian report is these are rare as the series of critical reports published by The Economist would testify.
But nonetheless such reports demonstrate how much we have developed from Henry Kissinger’s dismissal of Bangladesh as an international basket case. It is, however, difficult to grab the factuality of such projections as we are yet far from Clay Shirkey’s Cognitive Surplus where television’s passive consumers are transformed into active producers and sharers of interactive media.
Shirkey points out that there are now 2 billion people online across the world, and more than 3 billion with mobile phones. Given that there are around 4.5 billion adults worldwide, Shirky writes "we live, for the first time in history, in a world where being part of a globally interconnected group is the normal case for most citizens". With this many people involved, the collective leverage that can be brought to bear on any particular project or problem is colossal. But then this may be true for the US and the West. The present government’s aim to digitalize Bangladesh is praiseworthy. But poverty and illiteracy, among other factors, are likely to stand in the way of reaping the benefits of Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus.
While case may be made for relatively rapid development of Bangladesh despite constraints if proper policies are followed the problem of equitable distribution of the fruits of developments will have to be addressed.
Digitalization and mechanization will inevitably mean replacement of manual labour—a difficult decision for political leaders to make in a populous country like ours.
As Nobel laureate Paul Krugman wrote in a recent piece in The New York Times ( December 27 2012) “if income inequality continues to soar, we’re looking at a dystopian, class-warfare future — not the kind of thing government agencies want to contemplate”.
Paul Krugman was referring to the US and not Bangladesh. But then uneven distribution of national wealth is extant in Communist China as it is in democratic India. Gini coefficient that measures the distribution of income among individuals or households that deviates from a perfectly equal distribution in an economy has been growing from 0.39 in 1983/84 to 0.46 in 2010 causing concern among many people.
According to Policy Research Institute another dimension of the inequality problem is provided by the respective income shares of the bottom and top 5 percentile of the population. The income share of the bottom 5 percent of the population fell from 1.2 percent in 1983/84 to less than 1% in 2010. In comparison, the income share of the top 5 percent has grown from 18.3 percent to about 25% over the same period. In addition to the adverse implications for poverty reduction effort, the growing concentration of income presents a social challenge of relative deprivation. Even if one has to accept a degree of injustice one has to conform to Rawlsian proposition that inequalities in society must be organized so that they are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.
Rawls explains “To say that inequalities in income and wealth are to be arranged for the greatest benefit of the least advantaged simply means that we are to compare schemes of cooperation by seeing how well off the least advantaged are under each scheme, and then to select the scheme under which the least advantaged are better off than they are under any other scheme.”
With two competing arrangements of incomes in a society, the fairer of the two – and therefore the more just of the two – is the one that is to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. Perhaps our leaders may wish to take up the struggle for justice and for a fairer Bangladesh instead of “serving” the people from the top.
The writer is a former Secretary and ambassador
No comments:
Post a Comment