Independence and industry: Performances, patterns, prognoses

a 10-part series by Imtiaz A. Hussain examines one sector in one article on each Tuesday and Friday of our independence month, beginning March 01 and ending on April 01 with an overall appraisal. The last article of the series follows | Published: April 01, 2016 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00

How has our industrial sector changed after 45 years of independence? What will the country look like on its 50th birthday anniversary?
Those were some of the questions addressed in a 10-part "Independence & Industry" series. In this concluding part, the significant changes are identified, their contexts clarified, hindrances exposed, and the immediate future appraised.
At least five significant changes occurred after 1971. First, the industrial sector overtook agriculture's contribution to the gross domestic production (GDP), highlighted by the apparel sector replacing jute as the economic anchor, unleashing an unprecedented women workforce that was hitherto circumscribed by the nature of farm-work.
Second, though the RMG industry became the poster-child of low-wage production, the emergence of high-skilled manufacture was evident, particularly in our pharmaceutical industry: here might lie those initial rumblings of a necessary matrimony between industry and research universities.
Third, both low-wage and high-skilled industries helped the country integrate better in the global economy than ever before: not just in supplying markets, but also adopting rules and regulations, as with the textiles Accord and Alliance, and patenting innovations, as with the pharmaceutical industry.
Fourth, demography directly affected industrial restructuring: doubling the population converted the expanded tea sector from a net exporter to an importer; the sugar and paper industries stand on the threshold of becoming major exporting items, if, and only if, the kinds of innovations that characterise the fishing, leather, and pharmaceutical industries are taken and encouraged; and tourism is beginning to expand primarily due to the domestic population boom, the resultant emigration, and the growth of expatriate visitations.
Finally, post-industrial summons have not only been heard, but that they point in paradoxical directions, exposing promises but also problems, need to be heeded: research and development necessary for innovation demand white-collar workers, and with them, livingÂ standards commensurate with affluence; but also the embedded environmental and ecological deficits, along with health and sanitary improvements, demand attention
At least five contextual influences lie behind the above changes. First, nationalised industries yielded to private enterprises from the late 1970s, that is, before the term "neo-liberalism" was coined: yet, this shift was most rapid during the apogee of neo-liberalism, that is, the late-1980s and 1990s.
Second, concomitantly, our relatively closed commercial windows also began to open up, again, more so in the 1990s than in the 1980s, leaving us both a global supplier and market, as in the British Empire years.
Third, how our business sector dominates labour unions is a well-known fact, but behind that, its invigorating relationship with government leaders sets into motion an increasingly powerful corporatist culture to conjoin the kinship counterpart our history is riddled with.
Fourth, even a robust corporatist setting has not been sufficient to attract foreign investors, accounting for less than 1.0 per cent of our gross national product (GNP), even though the doors to foreign investment have been more open than ever before. Only last month, a JETRO (Japan's External Trade Organisation) survey found that, though Bangladesh is most attractive in wages and business confidence among its neighbours, these features were spiralling downwards, demanding further reforms.
Finally, Bangladesh's shift from infrastructure-deficiency (Khurshid Alam and Tahsin Farah Chowdhury found the quality to be the second-worst in this region, above only Myanmar, in their February 25, 2016 article in this very newspaper) to infrastructure-construction (a majority of the ECNEC-approved projects in 2016 target this) is particularly noteworthy. It did not play a part in our transition from an agricultural background into manufacturing; but prioritising them now is pivotal to the country's shift from industrial to post-industrial society.
Forty-five years of Bangladesh independence has also exposed a number of hindrances to industrial growth. First, the sticky-feet behind shifting from one line of production to another, most vivid in our RMG industry, sets in motion an industrial rigidity that is at odds with the product-cycle: no single product has been known to last longer as a viable market commodity than the length of a generation in any given country (for us, between 20 and 30 years, depending on whether the 1980s or today is the time). Creative juices get throttled, low-wages remain stuck, and ultimately both prohibit the advancement into a higher industrial or post-industrial threshold.
Second, the country's neglect of environmental and ecological considerations, as well as labour and working conditions, has been all too conspicuous: reliance on fossil-fuels holds the future hostage to contemporary greed, jeopardising what we may bequeath to next generations.
Third, the broader context of rules/regulations of civil society still await full implementation and respect, beginning with obeying traffic codes on our crowded highways to paying taxes and countervailing corruption. Only last month, ActionAid pointed out how 18 treaties prevent the government from collecting due taxes from foreign investors, to the extent of a hefty $85 million. Adding individual-level exemptions and misappropriations to that, the country's growth faces serious but unnecessary corrosion.
Finally, the country lacks a proper industrial policy: the shift from agriculture to manufacture, then the forays toward a service-sector post-industrial society have been left to arbitrary private sector initiatives with little or no governmental guidelines or supervision.
No country on record has industrialised as cleanly as citizens might expect, or as fluently as theory predicts. Since Bangladesh also carries its own can of worms, larger though it may be than elsewhere, the country must not stand out for not tackling inherent problems in its own backyard. "You've come a long way, baby," runs a popular Virginia Slim cigarette advertisement, one that holds firmly for Bangladesh's economic progress: without independence, we would have neither ample private entrepreneurs to sail the industrial seas as confidently as they do today, nor the spread-effects trickling down to a larger, more engaged population as the 1971 liberation war paved the way for, no matter how slowly.
Two cheers then for our industrialisation: one for getting us where we are, which is precisely where hopes over-ride hangovers; and the other for a glimpse of the future in which compensatory changes that were either overdue or routinely expected can be made.
To get there, an industrial policy should transform the $50 billion RMG export target by 2021 into unleashing equally profitable alternate industries out of fishing, leather, pharmaceuticals, and tourism, individually or through combinations. We simultaneously must cultivate the infrastructure of post-industrial pathways from now, based on information technologies (ITs), among others. As much will depend, then, on our industrial performances, patterns they have assumed, and their contextual colourings, as on qualitative improvements. How good we look may be a more pertinent future question than today's of how much we have.Â Â
Dr Imtiaz A Hussain is Professor, International Relations,
formerly Universidad
Â Iberoamericana, Mexico City.
inv198@hotmail.com