\\\'New normal\\\' overshadows hope about becoming middle-income country

When there is a shopping spree before festivals, we appear to have a sense of complacence. It is as if the nation has already achieved the long-cherished economic emancipation. Moreover, the ruler's eyes can't see how consumers as individuals and families manage to buy goods and services, not to mention the conditions of 'the have-nots'.
Is there enough rise in the people's income to meet their increasing needs of daily life? The state of the country's job market, as an indicator of flow of money, doesn't say so. Trends of investments don't confirm that new opportunities are being created or going to be created soon. Almost 50 per cent of candidates for white-collar jobs (graduates) are unemployed at present. And nobody can claim that the number of blue-collar jobs - in industrial sector and in the overseas - has risen.
More than any other time in the recent past, the Bangladeshi people are concerned seriously about their economic status and future security, as is suggested by their lack of confidence. They are busy with pending tasks but are dissatisfied with the present. They don't also want to be catalysts for a radical change in the political economy - a fear of uncertainty dictates their mind to hang onto the status quo. Taking advantage of such an order, many people have emerged as high-spending consumers before they all can afford, at least legally, to raise their level of expenses.
Thus, it's another puzzle to solve: how will a populace, which is so scared of change or pessimistic about collective improvement, be able to lift this country to its next stage of development. The fixed-income people look helpless about meeting the costs of grocery items and medi-care services, paying for conveyance and utility bills and rearing up children, even if they stop helping relatives and friends in times of emergencies. When the gap in official statistics between savings and investments is so obvious, the stories of struggles of millions for running their families remain unknown to all of us.
Of course, the enterprising people try to upgrade their status through transition to the next level of progress and to induce others to dream and act accordingly. But today, they can hardly break the shackles - corruption, extortion, nepotism, red-tape, energy and land crisis, loss of working hours in traffic congestion, poor quality of education, fall-outs from adversial politics and many more.
Only those who are 'influential', being close to power and the privileged, and hold assets or possess huge sums of 'ill-gotten' money, have no reason to be worried about slow growth or even economic downturn. Such vested interests are opposed to any change in the status quo, particularly relating to dispersal of the benefits of growth among the commoners. When growth falters, what will the economy offer to the people outside the existing power matrix? Rather, the protagonists of the establishment want others to dance with them, singing the song [of a false notion] of prosperity, ignoring the urgency for an accelerated pace of pro-poor growth, notwithstanding the commitment of the government to making that happen.
So, the moderates may think, it is better to survive by adjusting with the stagnant situation bearing some semblance to 'new normal' - 'which is a period of time in which economies grow very slowly as opposed to growing like weeds, the way children do'. It's been a disconcerting sort of compromise in the context of the situation in the advanced economies that have reached almost a saturated point. In a new normal growth scenario, the gentleman, who made this term popular - Bill Gross who just left bond giant PIMCO - insisted: "The government plays a significant role in terms of deficits and re-regulation and control of the economy."
In our case, however, the signs of slowdown and improbability of a rebound at the moment are there, much before we reach, what is termed, the take-off stage. The private sector players who would lead the growth on the ground seem to be at great unease. The regulators and public sector facilitators can't deliver what are required for frog-leaping. Greed is what we have embraced rather unwittingly as the incentive for development, and an unhealthy consumerism-centric competition is spawning a widening social inequality and income-divide. Simultaneously, effective redistributive channels such as creation of new jobs, business opportunities, entrepreneurship development, wealth tax, promotion of innovations, supporting talents and social security are, in reality, far away from our sight and so are corrective reform measures.
Our policymakers, living in a state of somnambulism on the economic front, have created media hypes about the goal of reaching the status of a middle income country more than what they are actually doing to reach the target itself. The underlying message from the leadership to the masses is: 'Please be happy with whatever you have and whatever we deliver'. The government personnel continue to speak about bright possibilities for attaining the status of a middle income country in order to create an illusion about development sans people's democratic participation in its process.
We have less than seven years at hand to touch the lower threshold of an upper middle income country or the upper threshold of a lower middle income one -- at around US$4,000 per capita income from the current level of $1,044.
Who will then believe in the slogan, given the lack of effective initiatives to remove the barriers and ensure a quantum-leap from here? With the much-trumpeted Vision 2021 that has now been extended to 2041, we can quite objectively say, under the given circumstances, that a few generations would have to wait with a great deal of patience to achieve the coveted national goal of that grand 'vision'. Already, the challenges of unbalanced and unequal opportunities are dwarfing our efforts to confront them and to contribute to national development. All these have marred our prospects to achieve a double-digit growth rate of our national economy, despite having the advantages of our demographic dividend and the great resilience of our hard-working people.
Under such a situation, we are becoming more and more vulnerable to falling into a middle income trap, as some countries of Asia have already fallen so, after their initial economic break-through. Mere promises and pledges here do hardly make any sense for us under such circumstances. We are yet to start working on a knowledge-based economy for our next transition. The progress we have attained so far was based on, what Professor Wahiduddin Mahmud puts it, 'lower level of skills, technology, productivity and income'. "We will need an efficient system of economic governance that can respond to the needs of putting the economy firmly on the path to modernisation and global integration," he told this writer in an interview earlier this year.
The current ground-reality is that we are about to lose our competitive advantages, not because of slight improvements in standards of living, but for mis-governance or a wider scale, leading to a static growth performance (at 6.0 per cent). Consumerism, too, may deal a heavy blow to our future if our leaders continue to misuse resources and fail to harness the human potential, in the name of consumption-led growth while patronising kleptocracy.
The new normal is probably normal for the West which has failed to offer any alternative to the economic model of profit maximisation or perceived value addition. For the Westerners, the stimulus came earlier from war to bring their economies back to the growth path, later followed by injection of taxpayers' money for the rescue operation of the corporate giants.
In our dream and ideological pursuit, we seek prosperity in terms of excessive consumption. By this time, we have acquired a number of traits of consumers in Europe and America, much before improving our scorecard, even on a modest scale, to reach anywhere nearer to their level of excellence in a variety of areas relating to sustainable, modern development. Following exotic models unquestionably, we have ignored local social capital that could have ensured a better form of indigenous development and also paved the way for helping to overcome crises on a sustainable basis.
Our culture once provided incentives for striving for social progress and creating a platform for flourishment of individual talent through sharing of benefits and risks and supporting each other in a community. We are neither borrowing the best ideas from outside nor undertaking soul-searching efforts to develop a model that suits us best.

The writer is Executive Editor at ICE Business Times.  khawaza@gmail.com.