Averages mean little to my analysis since India is a collection of several Bangladeshes (about 8 in total). So if India has lets say 3 Bangladeshes far outpacing original Bangladesh in human capital quality, about 2 roughly even and 3 lagging....and producing a worse overall average by some metric....that still means economies of scale and cluster based development vastly in favour of India.
Thats why there is a massive discrepancy when it comes to Industrial and manufacturing output between India and Bangladesh....currently and in future projection.
That's exactly the long term advantage China has had say over Vietnam (which both have roughly comparable human capital development overall when averaged) in/around the 80s/90s especially.
I am not even going to bring in basic Education average parameters (which i generally weight much more heavily compared to health)...where India beats Bangladesh quite decisively (and even more when you consider the total numbers receiving higher and vocational education). You can look up the previous threads or UNESCO UIS database if you want those numbers (or I will post them here later if needed)
But lets stick to the human capital report 2015:
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Human_Capital_Report_2015.pdf
Some noticeable points:
1) India scores much better than Bangladesh in the under 15 score of human capital (India: 82, Ban: 75). Those are people that are going to be coming into play economically in the timeframe of 10+ years.
2) Quality perception of education. Comparing the profiles (rated from 1 to 7, higher = better):
For Maths/Science: India = 4.23 Ban = 3.36
Business schools: India = 4.43 Ban = 3.72
Specialised training services: India =4.21 Ban = 3.11
Capacity to attact talent: India = 3.82, Ban = 2.40
Capacity to retain talent: India = 3.93, Ban = 2.71
3) Labour force participation rate,
This is the reason Bangladesh equalises with India in the overall metric (along with life expectancy + ease of starting business helping). Its higher across all age bands (which may not be necessarily good in the 15 - 24 range, India also has lower incidence of child labour). So you can say overall that more women %-wise in Bangladesh have jobs outside the household. But is this what Bangladesh is going to rely on long term to be ahead in human capital terms (esp given India is improving its life expectancy + female employment + ease of business averages)? - because its certainly not a measure of human capital quality which is the next point:
4) Employment pattern:
Skilled employment share: India: 14.6% Bangladesh: 6.3%
Medium-skilled: India: 73.4% Ban: 53%
One can deduce from this that most of Bangladeshi employment is skewed to low skilled (around 40% remaining) compared to 12% for India remaining. That in a way also correlates well with the poverty rate of both countries.
5) All this culminates in one very basic stark discrepancy in the human capital "worth" of a nation, the patents filed by country to the USPTO in 2015:
India: 3355
Bangladesh: 2
Its corroborated by your WEF capital report looking at points 2 and 4 combined with India measuring better in cluster development, university-business collaboration and % public spending on education.
So any metric can be "averaged" out by equally weighting certain metrics when in all honesty human capital development needs to be skewed in its measurement to account for how the basic idea of capitalism works (high quality concentration + economies of scale).
So it is my point that there are several crucial areas in Human capital development that Bangladesh needs to address to make sure it is not caught in a bad place when these become more important as time goes by.....because Bangladesh growth is going to become much more sensitive to these parameters compared to India in the coming years.
