By TON Bangladesh

For a long Bangladesh has upheld its macroeconomic constancy through judicious economic and balance controlling along with the growth of its communal safety net and investment in substructure schemes. Economic far-sightedness, export industrialization, and policies such as the empowerment of women and girls have put Bangladesh to be ahead of its per capita GDP of other south Asian countries, particularly India.

The economic growth of Bangladesh has been steady over the past four decades and gross domestic product growth has been outstripping South Asia’s with the region contracting by 6.58 percent as a whole and Bangladesh growing by 3.5 percent in 2020. Agriculture used to add help a third of Bangladesh’s GDP but fell to less than 15 percent between 2010 and 2018, while industry’s contribution rose from less than a fifth to more than a third.

Since the 1990s production’s influence on GDP has folded, and distributes has grown 20-fold to more than US$40 billion. High payments of US$16.4 billion in 2019 from low-wage labor have also supported the country's economy. Bangladesh is expected to maintain its per capita GDP lead over India ahead also owing to strong remittances, exports, and agricultural growth.

In 2020, India’s per capita GDP fell to US$1,929 from US$2,098, and economic production fell to US$2.66 trillion from US$2.87 trillion. During a similar year, Bangladesh, a US$355 billion economy, passed India with a per capita GDP of US$1,961 afterward achieving 6 percent growth over the past 15 years.

Since 2004, Bangladesh’s GDP growth has been picking up but it was only in 2017 when India’s growth started falling, that it managed to outperform its bigger neighbor. Bangladesh’s per capita GDP mounted at half of India’s before the 2008 debt crisis, but by 2014 that figure had grown to 70 percent. Covid-19 caused India’s economy to contract by 7.3 percent in 2020, while Bangladesh’s grew by 3.5 percent.

Today, Bangladesh outclasses India in economic shortfall, retail trade balance, occupation, public debt, and investment-to-GDP ratios. Its human development programs, particularly in girls’ education, have brought potency rates by rejecting premature weddings.

Bangladesh has achieved well than India in numerous social development such as life expectancy, fertility, and child nourishment. The benefits of its economic rise reach a wider base, compared with India’s slanted delivery. This comprehensive development has elevated living values, which in turn has led to improved tutelage and healthcare.

Contrary to Bangladesh these big milestones, India has done poorly on human development, especially in economically retrograde states. For example, its female work participation rate was 19 percent last year, as compared to it Bangladesh's figure is 35 percent.

India’s core continues with adolescent marriages and early pregnancies in different states, the infant mortality rate is 47 per 1,000 live births with adverse effects on the well-being of a large majority. Bangladesh’s success lies in having addressed the fertility issue through struggles in education and women’s enablement.

Due to macroeconomic constancy, Bangladesh’s economy has grown around 270-fold in the past 5 decades in local money footings, and its budget deficit has stayed at 5 percent of GDP. It has become the world’s second-largest costume exporter, owing to its growth stratagem of export-oriented industrial development.

It is a fact that the textiles, garments, and footwear industries of Bangladesh are labor conducive to training and supervising unskilled and semi-skilled labor further boost-up Bangladesh’s exports. With its beneficial position in free trade agreements, and its innovation, many Indian purchasers have moved there to remain viable in the worldwide economic market.

Bangladesh is India’s sixth-largest dealing partner with bilateral trade worth US$10.8 billion in 2020-21, up from US$9.5 billion in 2019-20. Sensing the economic strides of Bangladesh India is also giving preference to Bangladesh to boost its trade.

India has taken initiatives to strengthen bilateral cooperation including boosting trade in commodities, services, and energy, infrastructure development, and encouraging cross-border investment.

As a south Asian country Bangladesh continues to surge ahead from many of its neighboring countries to get the economic gains as well as economic prominence in South Asia.