Beautifully explained and jives well with my experience observing industrial development in Korea, Taiwan and China on my travels in the mid 1990's. But for some among us (you know who you are - Allah help the less clueful and uninitiated), they will vehemently deny this basic proven Asian tiger approach and take cues from the stupid misguided license-Raj and PSU industrial moves Indians followed and are still following, much to their detriment.
- Indian approach of making everything from needles to ships DOES NOT WORK in Bangladesh. Our market is way too small to warrant some of these humongous and unwise industrial investments.
- We can only make what makes sense in terms of value addition. Clothing value addition is cheap and our labor value addition is the cheapest so far, even cheaper than Cambodia and way cheaper than India.
- India is a much larger country with much deeper pockets to absorb failed Public Sector Units. We can't.
- Look at the massive Indian PSU's that failed and landed on their lumbering faces recently,
- HMT Ltd.
- Tyre Corporation of India
- Jessop Ltd.
- Scooters India Lucknow
- NEPA MILLS Ltd.
- Triveni Structurals Ltd
- Tungabhadra Steel Products Ltd.
- Hindustan Cables
- India is large enough as a market that they can protect theirs from cheap imports with non-tarriff barriers if need be, we can't.
I will give everyone an example. Look at Scooters India.
They used to make Lambretta scooter copies, then they turned to making third rate Industrial three-wheelers, which no one bought. Too expensive and problems with parts availability. More expensive than Bajaj products and way worse in quality compared to Vespa industrial three-wheelers for retail delivery use. As long as India was a closed market, they could force Indian consumers to buy their crap, but when India opened up, their end was just a matter of time. I don't know if they are still running with govt. subsidies. I doubt it. Look at the conditions of this dump in spite of dozens of crores in investments...
ISO 9001 anyone?
Storage under open sky...
Bangladesh does not have the luxury to try and fail at this type of tomfoolery selling locally which can't compete with imports. Exactly what we should avoid doing.
We will export what we can make profitably and competitively to int'l markets, import what little quantity of anything we need at the cheapest cost, and only make locally when it makes economic sense...there is no Goddamn ego involved about 'we can make needles so we are world best' Bullsh*t.
Bangladesh has started deep level electronics manufacturing for cellphones because there is a viable large market locally and a NEED. So investments in component level manufacturing for cellphones were wisely made. Interestingly the rest of the subcontinent did not follow. Time will tell who is right.
No one in industrial countries I have been to, cares about any of this 'we can make this so mera desh mahaan' BS. The only people I see is some idiot uneducated Sanghis and their Bangladeshi 'chelas' jumping up and down about it as a basis for some idiotic 'superiority' - like it matters.
The only place it may matter in limited fashion is armaments and munitions which have embargoes and controls, so the Iranians for example are making their own copies of Chinese missiles and other platforms.
But if you are not a rogue state then who cares??