New leadership and the quest for liveability
The long awaited national election, held 17 years after the last genuinely contested vote, has brought with it a wave of public expectation. For many residents of Dhaka, some of those expectations are surprisingly simple, though no less reasonable for it. People in the megacity want a clean and orderly...
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LDCs' key challenges decoded
Though the services sector has become a leading source of growth and employment in the least developed countries (LDCs), it has yet to provide adequate, productive, and formal jobs. Instead, service-centric jobs in these countries are clustered in low-productivity and informal sectors, leading to limited income gains.These are some of...
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A rocky road awaits next government
The dust has finally settled on the 13th parliamentary elections, with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) securing a landslide two-thirds majority in a 300-seat parliament. The election not only restored democracy but also paved the way for the formation of a government with a genuine popular mandate for the first...
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Cost of unplanned urbanization
Bangladesh's agricultural land is rapidly declining, threatening national food security. Fertile fields are being sold to housing developers, filled for roads, or diverted for industrial projects. Government data show that around 70,000 hectares of arable land are lost to non-agricultural use each year, that is, about 219 hectares daily. Experts...
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New hope for export growth
After the recent India-EU FTA, Bangladesh has realised that there was a probable vulnerability of its exports in the EU market in the coming years. However, the executed Agreement on Reciprocal Trade (ART) between the USA and Bangladesh appears to be a strategic move to offset any fear in this...
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