Experts and discussants have differed with the findings of a BIDS research paper on inequality and employment generation in the country.
The research paper of Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS) claimed that the growth has contributed to poverty reduction not as per expected rate as it was earlier, has created jobs and has not increased inequality.
Economists and discussants, on the other hand, argued that poverty, inequality and employment generation should not be used as parameters to evaluate the quality of growth as there are problems with data.
Rather, high frequency data related to health, education, sanitation and electricity use which are available annually should be related with quality of growth to get better result.
They made the observations at a session of the two-day Research Almanac of BIDS 2018 at a city hotel on Sunday.
In a research paper on 'Quality of Growth in Bangladesh: Some New Evidence ', researcher Nahid Ferdous Pabon claimed that in the 1990s, real labour wage was high and the owners of non-labour factors (land, capital) enjoyed benefits.
In the last one decade, structural change in the rural economy, greater access of landless and marginal farmers to the land market due to absentee large land owners, growth of rural non-farm sector absorbing a part of rural surplus labour and higher price of agricultural products have not increased inequality, the research report said.
"Growth has become less inequality generating. Job creation has neither been stagnant nor shrinking. Rather, the job creation rate has been expanding at a greater pace than the working age population," the research paper stated.
Speaking at the session, Dhaka University economics professor Selim Raihan said the data used in the research were of 2013-14, 2014-15 and 2016-17 financial years.
"If we consider data over a longer time period, we will see that the effectiveness of growth in employment generation has fallen, compared to the previous years. We are achieving higher growth rate without generating much employment and increasing inequality over the past one decade," he said.
He said that although the readymade garment and remittance sectors are key drivers of the economic growth, the supporting domestic social policies were not enough to reduce poverty in a large scale.
Citing examples, the noted economist said the governments' investments related to health, education and social protection are very poor, he added.
He also suggested not to link quality of growth to inequality, poverty and employment generation, as data of a longer period of time are needed for proper evaluation.
Regarding the claim on expansion of rural economy in the research paper, Prof Selim Raihan said there has been low-value and low-equilibrium expansion in the rural economy.
But Bangladesh has to go for high-value industrialisation to see the expected structural reforms of the economy, he added.
He also said there was no major economic diversification over the past one and a half decades. Female labour employment has significantly declined in the manufacturing sector.
He suggested that Bangladesh should compare its development indicators with better economies like those in Southeast Asia, not with India or Pakistan.
In his remarks on the research paper, economist Binayak Sen said the rate of poverty reduction between 2005 and 2010 was 2.0 per cent annually, not 1.0 per cent which the researcher has mentioned.
The years between 2005 and 2010 were an exceptional period for Bangladesh economy and there were many reasons why there was deviation, he added.
He argued that growth is taking place but the rate of stunting is 36 per cent. The inequality rate is 0.52 while according to Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics it is 0.48.
BRAC university economics professor Farzana Munshi said that in the developing countries like Bangladesh, researches are not conducted on the relation of economic growth and employment generation due to noisy data.
Good quality growth requires good quality or decent jobs, she said.
"When we talk about growth, we don't talk about numbers only," said Ms Farzana.
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