Policy Brief
The study aimed to determine if Bangladesh’s decades-long high-level performance contradicted the widely accepted “stylized fact” among development specialists that “institutions matter.”
Budget compression (i.e., the unsystematic annual cutting of budgeted expenditure) is an established procedure in Bangladesh. This feature of the budget process has been evident for at least three decades. It has been and remains the authorities’s principal strategy for reconciling its continuing inability to mobilize the revenue to cover planned expenditure and/or formulate a budget in which planned expenditures match the revenues that can be mobilized. The principal driver of compression has been to control the budget deficit in ways that reduce the risk of “debt distress.”
Viewed in broad terms, budget compression has been one of the many workarounds that military, caretaker, democratic multi-party, and single-party governments have used to handle Bangladesh’s multiple institutional weaknesses. Some of the most prominent of these were examined by local and foreign scholars in a recent study titled “Is the Bangladesh Paradox Sustainable?” The study aimed to determine if Bangladesh’s decades-long high-level performance contradicted the widely accepted “stylized fact” among development specialists that “institutions matter.”
Policy Brief
This policy brief explores the macroeconomic challenges posed by the politcal upheaval of July-August 2025 and explains that with serious and sustained reform, the country can overcome these hurdles and pursue inclusive growth and development.
Occasional Paper
This policy paper aims to provide an analysis of the current state of the solar power industry in Bangladesh, identifying the gaps and risks associated with the implementation of the government’s renewable energy goals.
Policy Brief
The challenge in this policy note is to look beyond the transitory factors in Bangladesh that have moved relative prices up (or down) to identify the longer-term factors that generate and sustain general price increases and to explain why those factors endure.
Policy Brief
This policy brief explores the macroeconomic challenges posed by the politcal upheaval of July-August 2025 and explains that with serious and sustained reform, the country can overcome these hurdles and pursue inclusive growth and development.
Occasional Paper
This policy paper aims to provide an analysis of the current state of the solar power industry in Bangladesh, identifying the gaps and risks associated with the implementation of the government’s renewable energy goals.
Policy Brief
The challenge in this policy note is to look beyond the transitory factors in Bangladesh that have moved relative prices up (or down) to identify the longer-term factors that generate and sustain general price increases and to explain why those factors endure.
