Manufacturing sector’s contribution to GDP keeps rising

[peagle]

Good news. BD has no choice, LDC facilities will end. Manufacturing will drive our economic growth at a national level. Hopefully these SME will graduate to becoming international exporters after satisfying national demand for our products.

We must get our people out of agriculture and into these sectors. I look forward to the day BD agriculture is primarily dominated by big players farming huge tracts of land using modern methods that increases our current yeilds.

Added benefit of developing these jobs would be to create a solid industrial base and giving our people stable careers. These will translate into greater productivity per worker, in this metrix BD ranks very low.

Give our worker stability and we will see population going down and BD transforming into a knowledge based economy climbing up the value chain.

This economic path has been emulated by every successful country and we will also travel this well trodden path in-sha-allah.

Well said,
but I wouldn't be too worried about the population issues, especially it going down. I believe you guys have already stabilised the population, that's good planning. Bangladesh has rich soil and agricultural technology will continue to improve, so I think the landmass of Bangladesh should be able to cater for it's existing population.

Please look around the world, countries that have targeted drastic population reduction policies are now trying to increase or stabilise their populations. Population control is good, but should only be followed looking at wider issues. After all, a rich Bangladesh of close to 200 million is a powerhouse global actor, a rich Bangladesh of 100 million is just another large country.

 

[MH.Yang]

Thank you but BD is far behind Sri Lanka.

In terms of GDP per capita, Sri Lanka is at $4,000 US dollars while BD is at only $2,600.

Even if the current rates of growth are maintained it would take till maybe 2035-2040 for BD to catch up with Sri Lanka.

BD interest is for the whole of S Asia to grow better than it has been doing since independence.

A thriving and prosperous region will allow BD to grow even quicker than it is doing now.

I believe more in the future of a manufacturing country than in agriculture and tourism.
Moreover, Bangladesh is a homogeneous country. We are well aware of the great development advantages of homogeneous countries.

 

[UKBengali]

I believe more in the future of a manufacturing country than in agriculture and tourism.
Moreover, Bangladesh is a homogeneous country. We are well aware of the great development advantages of homogeneous countries.

Sri Lanka is the closest to BD in being in terms of a homogenous country with 75% ethnic Tamils.

They should be fine with agriculture and tourism as they are a tiny country with just 20 million people in a relatively large land mass by S Asian standards.

India and Pakistan are unlikely to ever grow at the fast and consistent rates that BD is and will do due to their multi-ethnic nature and huge populations for their land masses.

As long as there is no major war and the rest of S Asia is able to get decent and consistent growth rates then that is in BD's interest.

BD exports to India have grown to 2 billion US dollars a year from just 1 billion US dollars just 3 years ago. BD and Indian economic relationship is quite important both for BD's economic development and Eastern India.

 

[mb444]

Well said,
but I wouldn't be too worried about the population issues, especially it going down. I believe you guys have already stabilised the population, that's good planning. Bangladesh has rich soil and agricultural technology will continue to improve, so I think the landmass of Bangladesh should be able to cater for it's existing population.

Please look around the world, countries that have targeted drastic population reduction policies are now trying to increase or stabilise their populations. Population control is good, but should only be followed looking at wider issues. After all, a rich Bangladesh of close to 200 million is a powerhouse global actor, a rich Bangladesh of 100 million is just another large country.

I suspect with climate change 200m population is too much. BD will top out at around 180m and then start to reduce. Population control measures has bought our growth to replacement level.

As people become educated and kids are secured in schools it will fall futher. BD can sustain large population due to productivity of our soil but we should not take this for granted.

We must transition to manufacturing and tech driven economy.

The issue is larger the subcontinent as a whole need to progress together...no one country can forge ahead without our neighbours doing the same. It is my hope that in my lifetime the subcontinent progresses and achives stability and maturity of EU under a rule based system where people break out of the hindu muslim dogmatic nonsense.

I agree with you but just to educate yourself please watch the 2nd and 3rd videos in post #3 to get some idea that you can produce sprockets in jhupri patty's with minimal investments from ship plate (using cheap Pakistani or Indian lathe/punch/broaching/gearcutting/milling machineries). The skills required are minimal.

There could be 1000 of these roadside sprocket workshops set up (and 10,000 jobs created for value addition purposes) for exporting these motorcycle sprocket/gear sets to India in addition to supplying to Bangladeshi motorcycle assembly factories owned by Runner/Hero/Bajaj/Honda/Kawasaki etc. Bangladeshi motorcycle ownership has grown 30 to 35 percent year-on-year the last three years and is only poised to increase further in the future. This happens when GDP per capita on PPP terms exceeds $4000.

Sports bike demand goes gangbusters in Bangladesh

The local market for sports motorbikes is poised for phenomenal growth over the next decade in line with the mega development spree the country is going through. With the market size for the exquisite vehicle rolling at around 30 to 35 per cent year-on-year, the bike boom is primarily urban and...

businesspostbd.com

An Electric Arc Furnace with quantum technology set up in Chittagong at GPH Ispat recently (Primetal/Siemens/Mitsubishi) technology needed the following steel making inputs in addition to hundreds of millions of dollars in investments.

Year

Month

Thermal Coal $/tonne

Steel scrap $/tonne

Natural Gas $/BTU m

Electricity c/kWh

2022

2

n/a

142.8

27.23

n/a

New Steel Plant

www.gphispat.com.bd

"Elahi Karbar" in other words. We need billets and re-bars (TMT rods) - but that does not mean we give up high-value ship plates to melt into low-value billets (which are made from imported scrap steel anyhow).

High strength ship plates can be readily converted to items like gear and sprocket sets using machining (or semi-truck fifth wheel plates) with minimal hydraulic press/welding processing and that processing (machining/pressing/welding) can be done in jhuprees, just like in Pakistan (which is done with cheap local machines). We need to expand dholaikhal/Jinjira situation and improve quality to supply our local parts needs for light engg. industries like motorcycles. Something myself and @bluesky bhai have been advocating forever.

This is how Japan developed, using small scale industries using minimal mechanization. @bluesky bhai would you agree?

@PoondolotoPandalum can motorcycle sprockets and gear sets machined in roadside shops (given proper Q/A is maintained) be sold to motorcycle mfrs. in Bangladesh and India? I know you are a proponent of laser CNC machining probably - but got to look at value addition employing people Dholaikhal style (bottom up development) in Bangladesh.

I do not disagree with anything you have said. I just think these development will come to BD we just need the minimal demand to arise to make such investment by entrepreneurs viable.

Really interesting news last year Isphat guys started exporting steel to china!!!

 

[Bilal9]

Sri Lanka is the closest to BD in being in terms of a homogenous country with 75% ethnic Tamils.

Bhai as far as I know Sri Lanka is majority (75%) ethnic Sinhalese (Sinhala) community. Tamils are ethnic minority.

Sinhala people and their language is considered part of Indo-Aryan language family. While Tamils and their language is part of the Dravidian ethnicity and language family.

Of course as usual, there are loan-words that have crossed over to these languages.

I suspect with climate change 200m population is too much. BD will top out at around 180m and then start to reduce. Population control measures has bought our growth to replacement level.

As people become educated and kids are secured in schools it will fall futher. BD can sustain large population due to productivity of our soil but we should not take this for granted.

We must transition to manufacturing and tech driven economy.

The issue is larger the subcontinent as a whole need to progress together...no one country can forge ahead without our neighbours doing the same. It is my hope that in my lifetime the subcontinent progresses and achives stability and maturity of EU under a rule based system where people break out of the hindu muslim dogmatic nonsense.


I do not disagree with anything you have said. I just think these development will come to BD we just need the minimal demand to arise to make such investment by entrepreneurs viable.

Really interesting news last year Isphat guys started exporting steel to china!!!

GPH Ispat had taken the bold step to invest in Asia's (and certainly South Asia's) first ultramodern Quantum Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) technology from PriMetal Austria which is a Siemens and Mitsubishi JV a few years ago.

The steel (billet) produced and exported to China is much higher quality than that produced using older technology. The process also uses far less electricity than used in antiquated older tech arc furnaces.

Since GPH in Bangladesh, this Quantum technology EAF has been set up in Turkey and in China (a dozen plants so far).

 

[Maula Jatt]

Sri Lanka is the closest to BD in being in terms of a homogenous country with 75% ethnic Tamils.

They should be fine with agriculture and tourism as they are a tiny country with just 20 million people in a relatively large land mass by S Asian standards.

India and Pakistan are unlikely to ever grow at the fast and consistent rates that BD is and will do due to their multi-ethnic nature and huge populations for their land masses.

As long as there is no major war and the rest of S Asia is able to get decent and consistent growth rates then that is in BD's interest.

BD exports to India have grown to 2 billion US dollars a year from just 1 billion US dollars just 3 years ago. BD and Indian economic relationship is quite important both for BD's economic development and Eastern India.

For other things I'd really hold my horses, not act like Bangladesh cricket team fans and let time decide- rn I predict India or parts of it doing best followed by anyone with best higher education/ universities who can churn out proper research related to agriculture, industry, avionics, medicine, defense, cammunications or whatever (reason why india was ahead according to me)
Sri Lanka can kill it here as they have the base but they'll need focused leadership

 

[Bilal9]

View attachment 824814
For other things I'd really hold my horses, not act like Bangladesh cricket team fans and let time decide- rn I predict India or parts of it doing best followed by anyone with best higher education/ universities who can churn out proper research related to agriculture, industry, avionics, medicine, defense, cammunications or whatever (reason why india was ahead according to me)

You make it sound like it is a negative. It is not.

There is a reason, Bangladesh is so densely populated, you can more or less farm almost all of it.

It is not population density - but productivity that matters. And that productivity can be industrial or agricultural. Macau, Hong Kong, Singapore or Bahrain are as densely populated as Bangladesh (or more).

Population density in Asia | TheGlobalEconomy.com

The average for 2021 based on 47 countries was 1016 people per square km. The highest value was in Macao: 20806 people per square km and the lowest value was in Mongolia: 2 people per square km. The indicator is available from 1961 to 2021. Below is a chart for all countries where data are...

www.theglobaleconomy.com

There is hardly any fallow land (other than maybe in the Hill Tracts). We don't have Himachal Pradesh area which is unfarmable, nor anything like Thar desert or Baloch areas where you cannot grow anything.

Where land cannot be farmed in Bangladesh - it can be fished or put to other productive use.

Bangladesh - this tiny piece of land no bigger than Wisconsin, produces three crops of rice a year and is the third largest producer of vegetables and freshwater fish globally. There is no comparison on productivity with the rest of the subcontinent.

Bangladesh' fertility per woman is below replacement level (around 2.1 children per woman) and this is dropping even further, Thanks to education available to women. Other neonatal and life-quality HDIs are also better than India, don't know about Pakistan. Eventually Bangladesh will be much less densely populated as industrialization continues and income levels go up.

The key is "bottom-up" growth, where other neighbor countries really missed the boat collectively. Got to educate your people, especially the women. They have to become productive at other things than producing babies.

 

[Maula Jatt]

You make it sound like it is a negative. It is not.

There is a reason, Bangladesh is so densely populated, you can more or less farm almost all of it.

There is hardly any fallow land (other than maybe in the Hill Tracts). We don't have Himachal Pradesh area which is unfarmable, nor anything like Thar desert or Baloch areas where you cannot grow anything. Where land cannot be farmed - it can be fished or put to other productive use.

Bangladesh - this tiny piece of land no bigger than Wisconsin, produces three crops of rice a year and is the third largest producer of vegetables and freshwater fish globally. There is no comparison on productivity with the rest of the subcontinent.

Bangladesh' fertility per woman is below replacement level (around 2.1 children per woman) and this is dropping even further, Thanks to education available to women. Other neonatal and life-quality HDIs are also better than India, don't know about Pakistan. Eventually Bangladesh will be much less densely populated as industrialization continues and income levels go up.

The key is "bottom-up" growth, where other neighbor countries really missed the boat collectively.

your friend did - I made no such judgments (that's why I highlighted the point)
but its not hard to make the land arable- you just need canal systems but it results in population boom (Pak, Nigeria and thier crazy pop boom of last 100 is result of canal systems in an historicaly underpopulated land) so countries especially developing ones don't do it as it results in unsustainable pop growth
Only places with very high birthrates rn are KP/Afghan border regions and Kashmir, gilgit because Thier canal, dams were recently devoloped this devolopment directly correlated with birth rates and pop growth in those areas when other stabilized largely

So with canals, dams you can easily make land arable, that's no issue but resulting pop growth is

But one thing that's really good about density in pop (I know quality of life may suffer but on paper stuff) is it's much easier to provide services- if you're gov for example it's much easier to make a hospital for 100k people compared to 5k pop towns

Cause that 100k one would be profitable, and provide services for everyone

But 5k is not profitable so you actually end up running huge losses because of it - to be underpopulated without natural resources comes with it's own problems (although I think generally life is much easier and better- I moved from NYC to a more rural/suburban setting that's why just a personal thing not related to countries)

 

[Bilal9]

your friend did - I made no such judgments (that's why I highlighted the point)
but its not hard to make the land arable- you just need canal systems but it results in population boom (Pak, Nigeria and thier crazy pop boom of last 100 is result of canal systems in an historicaly underpopulated land) so countries especially developing ones don't do it as it results in unsustainable pop growth
Only places with very high birthrates rn are KP/Afghan border regions and Kashmir, gilgit because Thier canal, dams were recently devoloped this devolopment directly correlated with birth rates and pop growth in those areas when other stabilized largely

So with canals, dams you can easily make land arable, that's no issue but resulting pop growth is

But one thing that's really good about density in pop (I know quality of life may suffer but on paper stuff) is it's much easier to provide services- if you're gov for example it's much easier to make a hospital for 100k people compared to 5k pop towns

Cause that 100k one would be profitable, and provide services for everyone

But 5k is not profitable so you actually end up running huge losses because of it - to be underpopulated without natural resources comes with it's own problems (although I think generally life is much easier and better- I moved from NYC to a more rural/suburban setting that's why just a personal thing not related to countries)

You make interesting points but I have some counterpoints as well. Let me find a better time to respond as I am a bit pre-occupied with other things...

 

[UKBengali]

Bhai as far as I know Sri Lanka is majority (75%) ethnic Sinhalese (Sinhala) community. Tamils are ethnic minority.

Sinhala people and their language is considered part of Indo-Aryan language family. While Tamils and their language is part of the Dravidian ethnicity and language family.

Of course as usual, there are loan-words that have crossed over to these languages.

You are right, I got confused between the 2 ethnic groups.

View attachment 824814
For other things I'd really hold my horses, not act like Bangladesh cricket team fans and let time decide- rn I predict India or parts of it doing best followed by anyone with best higher education/ universities who can churn out proper research related to agriculture, industry, avionics, medicine, defense, cammunications or whatever (reason why india was ahead according to me)
Sri Lanka can kill it here as they have the base but they'll need focused leadership

Why let more time decide dude?

Both Pakistan and India have had an extra 24 years of indepedence and already leafrogged by BD in per capita nominal GDP. If you have not been able to get your act together in over 70 years, then little chance you will do it in the next 10-20.

Accept that both Pakistan and India's multi-ethnic nature has destined those countries to at best mediocre economic performance.

It may be a bitter pill to swallow but that is the destiny of living in a country where there is no dominant ethnicity - it spends most of it's energy keeping itself from disintegration.

As an example of where BD is heading it is the only S Asian country that is exporting indegenous electronics in numbers to most developed economies at this moment - BD's Walton predicts 100 million US dollars this year and potentially over 1 billion by 2025.

BD does not even compare itself to S Asia anymore in economy and is targeting SE Asian economies like Indonesia as a benchmark at this time.

 

[bluesky]

Both Pakistan and India have had an extra 24 years of indepedence and already leafrogged by BD in per capita nominal GDP.

Why do you always talk about independence of India and Pakistan in 1947 and not the then East Pakistan? Was not East Pakistan as a part of Pakistan became independent also in 1947?

We were independent Pakistan in 1947 and again independent Bangladesh in 1971. No one in east Pakistan ever said "Pakistan Murdabad" before the PA troops started operation in 26 March 1971.

Stop your idiotic BAL Chetona whining all the time. You b*stard Chetona group think there was never a Pakistan Awami League and it was always Bangladesh Awami League even before 1971.

Respect history and stick to it when you talk, bloody idiot!!!

 

[Wergeland 2.0]

ideally the feritility rate of women in BD should be slightly above replacement level.

Once a nation falls below replacement level the fate is more or less sealed. That dosent mean the country will stop growing, which it will, because of value addition and increased skill level and sophistication of economy. Its just means that fertility rate will not be able to be pushed back above replacement level as long as HDI is increasing.

You can throw as much money as you want on young couples and families but fertility rate wont simply grow. Its a measure of every individual goals for their life. People stop having babies because they want to enjoy life (materialism).

The alternative is if course immigration, which is the case in the entire West. That is what keeps western population numbers from crashing.

The best policy is to have a multifaceted long term societal policy where there is room for three main groups; the religious family oriented making up 30% of total population and have high fertility rate, the indivdualist secular oriented 10-15% of total population having low fertility rate (below replacement) and those who are mixture of those two types and make up the majority, maybe 50-60% of total population, feritility rate right around replacement level.

In this way a nation will get benefitted from all three types of population and their strengths. The religious portion will keep the replacement level healthy. Even when the country as whole is economically mature. There will be no need for immigration with this model IMO.

 

[Bilal9]

So with canals, dams you can easily make land arable, that's no issue but resulting pop growth is

Well if that would be the case then some parts of Western India would be too prosperous already, e,g, Haryana.

And it costs money and needs water. Not as easy as some think. Lack of water is essentially what drove Harappa and Mohen-jo-Daro to extinction.

We need to go back to the basics of irrigation and hydraulics and look at why agricultural prosperity occurs. Not only rivers but rainfall/humidity are huge factors.

You make it sound like canal and dam based irrigation can be easily done in dry areas in North India and Western Pakistan at whim and at the drop of a hat. I beg to differ...

 

[bluesky]

Well said,
but I wouldn't be too worried about the population issues, especially it going down. I believe you guys have already stabilised the population, that's good planning. Bangladesh has rich soil and agricultural technology will continue to improve, so I think the landmass of Bangladesh should be able to cater for it's existing population.

Please look around the world, countries that have targeted drastic population reduction policies are now trying to increase or stabilise their populations. Population control is good, but should only be followed looking at wider issues. After all, a rich Bangladesh of close to 200 million is a powerhouse global actor, a rich Bangladesh of 100 million is just another large country.

When the couples have the means to control the production of their own kids, the govt cannot really surmount their desire.

By the way, perhaps you know that birth control planning was first introduced in east Pakistan at the time when General Ayub Khan was the President of Pakistan.

 

[PoondolotoPandalum]

There are many dysfunctional "homogenous" countries, and there are many successful highly diverse countries.

Was homogeneity an advantage for Bangladesh, relative to India and Pakistan? Probably yes. But it wasn't the most important factor. There's no substitute for good policy.

Multi-ethnic Singapore imposed totally bizarre legislation of not having ethnic enclaves. Every housing area has to satisfy the government ethnic composition quota, so a particular set of ethnicity doesn't concentrate. It turned out to be one of the best policies made in that country, something no economist ever theorized or predicted. Mixed neighborhoods meant much better cohesion at work/school etc.

Whereas in the UK, I believe 50% of British Muslims live in the bottom 8% of areas (IE, half of British Muslims live in the absolute worse shitholes in Britain). It's even worse in Europe. You have poor social mobility and social cohesion as a result.

Having a homogenous populous isn't a guarantee for stability. If it isn't ethnicity, it'll be land/family disputes that'll last generations. Humans will always find other ways to divide themselves. the answer is policy, not homoginizing