These "women entrepreneurs" are supposed to be the beneficiary of the local innovation called 'microcredit'. Microcredit has been around in Bangladesh for decades. Yet, according to TIME (16th April 2007, pages 43-4), "Some development experts warn that microcredit programs do little to alleviate overall poverty, even in countries like Bangladesh, where they are well-established. About 45% of the country's population lives below the poverty line, down just 2 points in the past two decades. In southeastern Bangladesh, recipients often use microlending to pay off old debts or buy consumer goods, not to generate income, according to a 2000 study by the aid group CARE Bangladesh. When it came time to pay up, the study found, borrowers were often forced to go into further debt."
Supporters of the two political parties incessantly point out that democracy has been good for Bangladesh because it has enabled the country to grow by 6% annually, whereas under military rule growth had been only 4.8%. Any undergraduate student in economics can tell you that GDP figures are no indicator of well-being: a country can grow very fast by spending enormously on defense, for instance, as happened in Germany before and during the Second World War: what matters is the source of growth and the nature of the beneficiaries; and also the accompanying negative externalities (in Germany's case, these included the people killed, so net welfare gain was the greatest negative in the history of humanity.)
The negative externalities between 1991 and 2007 in Bangladesh included the rape of thousands of women and the murder of hundreds by the armed youth and student wings of the two political parties. It is unfortunate that our political leaders are being tried for corruption when they should be tried for crimes against humanity, which includes rape (for a narrative of the violence under democratic rule, see http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_23393.shtml.). This must have escaped the narrow attention-span of the lawyer, Cherie Blair – or perhaps she just doesn't care for crimes committed against humanity, since her husband's fit the description to a T.
Immeasurable damage has been done to the country's main institutions: the bureaucracy, the judiciary and even the military were politicized. Subtract such negativity from the growth rate, and the welfare achieved under democratic rule narrows markedly. It narrows even further when you consider that the reduction in poverty, according to TIME, has been only 2% over the last twenty years. Where did all the money go?
The money went to a narrow elite of politicians, businessmen and bureaucrats. It is not surprising that there are over two hundred politicians and businessmen behind bars today, almost all charged with corruption or extortion. Indeed, the best analogy for the present state of affairs is not Myanmar, but Italy during the Mani Pulite (Clean Hands) corruption investigation: "Almost a whole political class fell into disgrace, as well as industrialists and senior judges. Some 2,500 people had been fingered as the year ended, including five former prime ministers and about 200 members of Parliament ("Year in Review 1993 ITALY." Encyclopædia Britannica)." "By this time magistrates in Palermo had turned their attention to still-murkier matters by accusing Giulio Andreotti, the preeminent veteran of Italian politics, of collusion with the Mafia". Deja vu.
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