RESEARCH PAPERS

Trade liberalisation, Growth and Poverty in Bangladesh

The impact of trade liberalisation on growth and poverty is a much debated and controversial issue. In theory, trade liberalisation results in productivity gains through increased competition, efficiency, innovation and acquisition of new technology. In the context of Bangladesh, there are disagreements among economists and policymakers on the issue. Though international financial institutions such as the World Bank and IMF have been consistently pursuing the claim that trade liberalisation in Bangladesh is conducive to achieving high economic growth and alleviating poverty, all economists in the country do not endorse it. The sceptics have raised questions about the design, pace, extent and method of trade liberalisation in the country.
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Political Economy of Trade liberalisation in Bangladesh

In the globalised world of today, trade liberalisation is often promoted for economic growth. But the link between economic growth and liberalisation of trade has been the subject of a lot of controversies in recent time. In fact, the growth argument for trade liberalisation has been challenged in many ways, albeit the proponents of liberalisation have their strong arguments in its favour as well.This study tries to contribute to the process of advocating for mainstreaming trade policy in the national development strategy of Bangladesh. While there are two different but interlinked aspects of trade liberalisation – economics and political economy – this paper focuses on the political economy of trade liberalisation in Bangladesh.
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Is the Stage set for mainstreaming International Trade in to National Development Strategy in India

In the globalised world of today, trade liberalisation is often promoted for economic Even though a large number of literature argue that trade can indeed play a major role in poverty reduction, provided right complementary policies and associated institutions are in place, the human development aspects of international trade in the era of globalisation is largely ignored by policymakers. The primary objective of the study was to go beyond an exploration of the likely impactof globalisation and trade liberalisation on the stakeholders of the agriculture sector,especially the most vulnerable amongst them; and enquire about the prevailing conditions for mainstreaming trade into national development strategy. This endeavour was deemed necessary as many of the available literature had already invested great effort on the impact analysis.
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Regional Trade Openness Index, Income Disparity and poverty

This study aims to examine how ‘open’ Indianstates are with respect to international trade and uses the index of regional opennessthus constructed to reflect on several aspects that affect the level of poverty in India, directly and indirectly. In this connection it should be noted that the estimation of the degree of openness is done for each state vis-à-vis rest of the world and not ‘between’ states in India, since it was difficult to have access to inter-state trade data. This means that even if one of the states produces an important intermediate commodity and another state processes it in favour of manufacturing an export commodity, the latter should be deemed more open to external trade as compared to the former
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