Bangladesh is missing critical opportunities in the two largest markets on its doorstep, economist Rehman Sobhan warned in a recent speech, arguing that the country’s private sector and policymakers have failed to adjust to a transformed global economic order.
Sobhan said Bangladesh’s duty-free access to China and India should have sparked a major reorientation of trade, investment and industrial strategy. Instead, he said, the country has remained “obsessed” with retaining its least-developed-country privileges in Western markets, particularly for garments. “We have neither chosen to diversify nor to develop working arrangements to plug ourselves into the supply chains of both countries,” he said.
Sobhan noted that China and India are now central drivers of global growth, technology and capital flows. He said that ignoring these markets is especially costly at a time when Western economies are slowing and U.S. trade policies have become more unpredictable. China, he said, has become the largest trading partner for most regions of the world, while India’s rapid expansion is reshaping South Asia’s economic geography.
Bangladesh’s failure to respond, Sobhan argued, is both strategic and structural. He said the government has not developed policies to help firms integrate into Asian value chains, while the private sector remains “risk-averse” and overly dependent on low-skill exports. This, he warned, leaves the country vulnerable as LDC-era trade preferences phase out.
Sobhan said Bangladesh will have to cultivate “a more adventurous and creative private sector” if it hopes to benefit from the shifting global economic center. Without that shift, he said, Bangladesh risks locking itself out of the very markets that will dominate the next generation of global growth.