Further, Momen notes that the average inflation rate during democracy was 4.9% - and yet, according to the Bangladesh Observer, inflation has been below 5% for only five years out of the last ten (May 18, 2007, page 1). "Under authoritarian economic management now, inflation this year is expected to reach 10 percent," observes Momen. And yet his article was published a few weeks after the army-backed caretaker government took over on January 11: he nowhere explains why he expects inflation under the present government to jump to 10%. And, above all, his statement is only a prediction: he clearly does not wish the army-backed government well, but he should know that a prediction is not a refutation.
The Economist observed (September 13th 1997): "As countries become rich, they tend to go through a 'demographic transition' in which fast-improving medical conditions and high birth rates combine to cause rapid population growth. This was the situation in most of Asia thirty years ago. Eventually, however, birth rates fall significantly, and population growth slows. This causes a shift in the age profile of the population from that of a lumpy pyramid - lots of infants and children and relatively few grandparents - to a kind of Chinese lantern, with relatively few people in the youngest and oldest groups and a big bulge in the middle. For economics this bulge is good news."
In 1991, this bulge constituted 56.8% of the population: that means more than half the population was of working and saving age, and in the next 15 years could expect to generate a great deal of savings, investment and labour. This has not happened.
Take the current account deficit: according to the author, it has declined from 4.1% to .7%! This is magical, to put it mildly. A developing country is expected to have a high current account deficit as machinery and other equipment are imported and paid for with borrowed money. This was the case with all the East Asian tigers during their boom phase; India today has a current account deficit of 2.3%. As economies mature, they start to send money abroad – that is, export capital – and the current account deficit narrows, disappears and turns into surplus. Today, East Asian economies are buying America's debt (exporting capital to America).
What about the suspiciously small current account deficit of Bangladesh: is it consistent with our vaunted high growth rate? Most certainly not. It would indicate that we are nearly self-sufficient in capital! The reality, I fear, is more consistent with the misrule and corruption of the last sixteen years: there is capital flight. People are not only voting, but they are voting with their money and their feet.
And if the politicians had done such a good job of the economy, why do we still have the famine-like condition in the north known as the "monga" every year?
And there are two more things the author forgets: first, the private enterprise on which our growth is supposed to be based was initiated by a certain military general called Ziaur Rahman. It was during the nationalization of industry under Mujib that incompetence as well as corruption began: people who ran the giant nationalized corporations had enormous power without corresponding incomes. They resorted to corruption to make ends meet by helping themselves to the national coffers. Nationalization was an invitation to loot.
One would expect that the impressive growth rate under democracy would have trickled down to the lowest levels of population and raise people above the poverty level. Today, 45% of the people still live below the poverty line, "down just 2 points in the past two decades" (TIME, April 16, 2007, page 44). Yet the streets of Dhaka, just before the latest military coup, teemed with BMWs and Lexuses. Along Satmasjid Road in Dhaka, glitzy shopping malls abound, and they are full of people, buying, not just window-shopping. The leisure industry has arrived, with theme parks in all the major cities; luxury hotels have appeared along the sea-shore, in the north-eastern hills, in the capital, and the port city. Bangladesh became more unequal between 1992 and 1996, with the Gini coefficient rising from 0.26 to 0.31 (World Development Report 2000/2001, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, page 53). As usual, a certain group – the upper- and upper-middle classes have benefited from the huge patronage system. Patronage is part of our culture, but under military rule, there was only one patron, not two.
What happened in 1990 was that we substituted two dictators for one, and boys with guns for men with guns.
Against this background, it would be wise to recall these words by Adrian Leftwich: "....development cannot simply be managed into motion by some idealised system of good governance, evacuated from the world of politics. For neither democracy nor good governance are independent variables which have somehow gone missing in the developing world: they are dependent ones. And whatever their relationship with economic growth and development may be, both are the products of particular kinds of politics and can be found only in states which promote and protect them. Indeed, they are a form of politics themselves and not a set of institutions and rules. ...Indeed, to insist on democratic institutions and practices in societies whose politics will not support them and whose state traditions (or lack of them) will not sustain them may be to do far greater damage than not insisting on them. Moreover, the kind of political turbulence which such insistence may unleash is bound to have explosive and decidedly anti-developmental consequences. (Adrian Leftwich, 'On the Primacy of Politics in Development', ed. Adrian Leftwich, Democracy and Development (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 18)" The italics are original.
The Ruined Institutions
"It is during this time that institutions of governance were destroyed, and corruption became a prominent part of the economy. There is no denying that both Major General Ziaur Rahman and Lt. Gen. H. M. Ershad showed the path of corrupting the administration with their hand-picked cronies."
We now begin to see that Momen – and many people like him, who still live under a personality cult – has no respect for reality, to put it mildly. We have seen that corruption was endemic during the Mujib years; yet he blames the military for initiating corruption.
Perhaps his other criticism should be taken more seriously: that the military destroyed major institutions in Bangladesh.
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