Growth and stagnation: Bangladesh’s first 50 years

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. We talk a lot on the show about unhappy situations, wars, famines, oppression and protests. You might think that the pandemic would have been an enormous hit to the global average of happiness. We examine data showing that it hasn't. And just as soon as a container ship got stuck in the Suez Canal, supply chains the world over started to creak. Now it seems weeks may be required to get it on the move again. We look at a blockage in a narrow artery of the global shipping system. But first, today marks 50 years of Bangladeshi independence. What was East Pakistan declared itself a new country in 1971 as what was left of Pakistan fought a brutal war to retain it.

The fighting has obviously been fierce. The shell holes which spatter the fields in the area are evidence of that.

It was a conflict that may have cost as many as 3 million lives. Millions more fled to India or were internally displaced, drawing the world's ATT to what would later be called a genocide.

Every day, upwards of 100,000 refugees are.

Making the long journey back from India to Bangladesh.

For many, it's a journey to heartbreak.

Devastating as the war of independence was, in some ways, it set Bangladesh on the path to success as expatriates flooded back to repair their broken homeland. By many measures, they succeeded. But the economic gains Bangladesh has made have not been matched by the development of a healthy, open democracy.

Bangladesh has not quite leapt from rags to riches in one generation, but it has come a long way in the last half a century.

Susanna Savage writes about Bangladesh for the Economist.

Walking around Dhaka now, it's really, really busy. It's full of people. You hear rickshaws and cars. Buses are everywhere. There's a lot of traffic, a lot of fancy cars on the road. As well, which is a sign of how much the country has move from being agricultural to being urban. Bangladesh at one point was part of India and then it was part of Pakistan and it was the poorest corner of both of those. And now Bangladesh's GDP per capita is much higher than Pakistan's and it's even caught up with India's recently. Before the pandemic, growth in Bangladesh was at about 8% for several years running, which is higher than most Asian countries. And Bangladeshis are not just doing well in terms of wealth, but also in terms of health. Life expectancy is longer than in India and longer than in Pakistan. Child mortality is better. Bangladesh graduated to lower middle income status in 2015. And it's also fulfilled the criteria to move from a least developed to a developing country, which has made a lot of people in Bangladesh very happy.

And how did it achieve that rise?

So the war was really devastating for Bangladesh, but it did one thing in that it helped Bangladesh set up a lot of NGOs and bring in foreign aid. So thanks to NGOs there have been huge improvements in health and overpopulation has really been curtailed. The main economic transformation is due to Bangladesh's garment industry. It's the second largest exporter of garments in the world. And this makes up 11% of its GDP and 80% of its export revenue. This has been really facilitated by attitudes in the country. So in both India and Pakistan, cultural conservatism has impeded women from working outside the home. But in Bangladesh, the share of women in the workforce has risen from 3% in the 70s to 36% in 2019. Hi, how are you? Good, thank you. Good, thank you.

How are you?

So I spoke to Calpohna actor who started working in the garment factory when she was 12. And she was able to support her whole family based on this after her father died. There is no one who can bring food on the table in our family. So, you know, I hadn't had choice. So I started working. The first day was really, really long.

You know, I got off from the.

Work like 10.30pm it was tough. So she supported her mother and two siblings. The widgets I draw.

It was 240 taka then and including.

Over and is now the founder of an NGO which campaigns on workers rights. And her experience really shows the role women have come to play in driving growth in the country and how that's been a big part of Bangladesh's transformation both culturally and economically.

And so it's a clear cut story in terms of development. And wealth. But what about politics?

The country's politics is a completely different story to development. The first half century of Bangladesh has been blighted by military coups and dictatorships. Power has see sawed violently between two dynasties. One led by the current Prime Minister, Sheikhasina Awajed, who leads the Awami League Party, and the other led by Khalidaziya, who leads the opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. When either of these dynasties have made into government, they've both zealously milked the profits of power, siphoning off cash, handing out contracts to their cronies. It's got particularly dark recently under Sheikh Hasina, who came back to power in 2009 and since then has ruled in an increasingly authoritarian vein.

And what do you mean by that?

So if we take elections for example, under both parties, these have often been violent and rarely completely free and fair.

But.

But in the last general election in 2018, the Awami League party and Sheikha Singh's government really took this to a new extreme. A lot of people I've spoken to turned up to vote and found that the voting station was already closed and the ballot boxes were already stuffed. Other people were coerced and threatened. And this all came after a campaign against the opposition party where a lot of its members and activists were locked up.

And so what do ordinary Bangladeshis make of that kind of oppression?

In general, people who are fighting for democracy think that so long as Bangladeshis continue to prosper, most are able to live with the trade off on their freedom and they're not likely to kick up too much of a fuss. But some people are less willing to stand back. I spoke to Mohammad Hanif, who goes by the name of Hanif, Bangladeshi. He's a democracy activist who protests mainly through staging marches across Bangladesh. Hanif told me that between December and March, he walked through all of Bangladesh, 64 districts, protesting for the right to vote and to have a functional democracy. And he gathered 23,000 signatures. He also told me that 50 years after independence, he doesn't think it's acceptable for the country to continue like this and that it's really defied the goal of independence, which was to be able to vote and have an effective democracy. He says that his generation, who he describes as the new generation, this is what they want.

And so where do you see this headed then with the relative economic strength and growth, but increasingly undemocratic politics.

So there are a lot of question marks over the future of both Bangladesh's democracy and its economic strength. Sheikh Asina is 74 this year, and she has no clear successor. And aside from that, there's a lot of question marks over how long one party rule can continue if growth falters in any way. And that's not actually as unlikely as you might think. COVID 19 in particular has really laid bare a lot of the inequalities that people are unhappy with. It's also pushed a lot of people back into poverty. More broadly than COVID 19, a lot of the traits that helped Bangladesh excel in its early years during the 70s, 80s and 90s, an openness to NGOs and a cultural openness, for example, that allowed women to work. A lot of these have come under threat with Sheikh. As soon as growing authoritarianism, for example, big NGOs have been put in their place and she started pandering to some Islamic groups who have agitated against secularism and women's rights. So Bangladesh has achieved a lot in the last 50 years, but the country's politics threatens to derail its upward trajectory and it's not really clear right now how Bangladeshis will react if it does.

Susanna, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks very much, Jason.

Foreign.

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COVID19 has taken a terrible toll on the world. Nearly 3 million people have died, economies have been squeezed, and citizens have had to sacrifice personal liberties in favor of safety. You'd think that the pandemic would make our day to day lives deeply miserable, but on average, people aren't quite as unhappy as you'd expect.

Every year there's a Big survey of dozens of countries which tries to get at how happy people are.

Joel Budd is the Economist's social affairs editor.

There are two big surprises this year. One is that the world has not become more unhappy despite coronavirus. And the other one is that the old have become even happier than they were.

How is happiness even quantified for these surveys?

You can simply ask people, are you happy, are you anxious, etc. But the most consistent question, and I think really the best question, is you tell people to imagine themselves on a ladder. There are 10 rungs on the ladder. The top rung represents the best life they could possibly have, and the bottom rung represents the worst life they could possibly have. And you ask them, sort of, what rung are you standing on? It's known as the Cantrill ladder, and it's quite a widespread way of trying to get at people's happiness and their general satisfaction with their own lives.

How did the outcomes look this time around?

The Gallup world poll surveyed 95 countries. That's slightly fewer than they normally do. But it's hard to do surveys during a pandemic. If you just take a simple mean average, the average score in 2020 was 5.85, and the score in the previous three years was 5.81. So very, very strangely, it hasn't changed. Entire countries have become happier or more miserable, but the average is the same.

But you say the other big surprise was with the age disparity. How does that look?

Coronavirus is incredibly dangerous for old people. And so I think you might have expected that the old would have become very dissatisfied. And the exact opposite is the case. So people over 60 have actually become more satisfied with their lives in 2020 compared to the previous three years.

So what's the guess on why older people would globally be a bit happier?

Well, I think one reason is that the old actually feel, in some cases, slightly better connected, especially better connected with their families than they did before. When coronavirus hit, I think it was many people's first instinct. Oh, goodness, you know, my poor parents or my poor grandparents, I better ring them. The other one, and this is a really strange one, is that the old believe that their health has got better. I assume what's going on there is that it's not that the old are really healthier than they used to be, but they think they're healthier because, well, at least they haven't got coronavirus. If you think that you are healthier, then you are, then you sort of become bit happier as it Were, you know, normally for old people, their happiness is kind of restrained by feeling that their health is fairly poor.

And what about at the other end of the spectrum, what's going on with the young?

The young are just in a really difficult situation. They're obviously not directly affected by Covid unless they're incredibly unlucky. But many of them have lost their jobs. Some of them have been unable to get jobs in the first place. So they've come out of school, they've come out of university and there are very few jobs to be had. Their futures just look rather difficult for the next few years. And also young people are very sociable. Young people have lots of friends, they go and see them a lot and that is what normally makes them happy. And so if you enforce social distancing, of course they can't do that. There are some studies that show that people with more friends have actually suffered more during the pandemic than people with fewer friends.

And what about looking across countries? You say there is quite a lot of variance across countries. Has the league table of happiest nations changed?

It has, but not at the very top. There are a few countries that always come top of the happiness rankings. Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Switzerland, Sweden. Their people remain very satisfied with their lives. There's been a lot more change below the top. And in particular Latin American countries have become less happy and East Asian countries have become more happy. There are some changes within Europe. So for example, Britain has really become quite a lot less happy and Germany has become substantially more happy.

And so how to make sense of those shifts around on that national level?

Well, I think to an extent you can put it down to Covid. Several of the countries at the very, very top of the happiness rankings just did very, very, very well against coronavirus. And of course Britain did very, very poorly against coronavirus. It has subsequently done much better in rolling out vaccinations. But when these surveys were done last summer and autumn, that was still in the future. Germany, of course, last summer and autumn was dealing with well.

And in looking at the data, are there any outliers, things that don't seem to fit the broader patterns?

Perhaps the biggest outlier is America, which has had a poor pandemic. Excess deaths are running higher than half a million. America has of course subsequently rolled out the vaccine very well. But when the surveys were taken last year, that hadn't happened. And yet Americans have become slightly more satisfied with their lives.

Good old fashioned American optimism. I say.

It could be that. It could also be that Americans don't expect their government to do very much for them. I think another possibility is for many Americans, coronavirus just isn't a very big deal. You know, it's something that's perhaps made up, not as serious as the liberal media is pretending. If you really believe that, then you're just not particularly distressed by what's happened there.

How about for your part, where would you have put yourself on the ladder in 2019 and where would you put yourself now?

I'm an optimistic person, so I think in 2019 I would have put myself on an 8 or a 9. But I have found it hard during the pandemic, actually, and I miss very strange things like my commute, which I always hated when I did it, but now that I'm not doing it, I sort of miss it. It gave me kind of quite a lot of routine.

Well, I suppose the optimistic view then is that your commute will be coming back and if not, you'll start riding up the curve of age enough.

Let's hope so.

Thanks very much for joining us, Joel.

Thank you.

A single 20 foot shipping container can hold 28 tons of goods. The ship ever given, one of the world's largest, can carry 20,000 containers. It's 400 meters long, a quarter mile, and that is long enough to block the Suez Canal.

Now it's one of the world's most.

Important shipping routes and it's blocked. A giant container ever given got wedged across the canal this week, apparently during a sandstorm.

This is a heck of a situation.

Nobody thought it could happen. It did. Now on either side of it, 230 ships holding 14 million tons of goods stuck in a maritime traffic jam that might last for weeks.

Shipping companies are considering making a very lengthy detour around South Africa instead.

The 120 mile long Suez Canal is one of the world's most important sea lanes. It links the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and in essence is crucial for shipping between Asia and Europe and even on to the east coast of America.

Simon Wright is the Economist's industry editor.

Last year, nearly 19,000 vessels plied the maritime shortcut. They carried about 12% of global trade by volume and around 10% of the world's oil.

So what's been the reaction to this block then?

Well, the price of crude oil shot up by 5% on news of the accident and tankers are piling up at the southern end of the canal. The pile up means that global trade is bound to suffer. Supply chains are already stretched near to breaking point. And this could be the thing that Pushes them over the edge.

And so how is it that just a couple of days delay can already be stretching supply chains, though?

Well, I think that's probably not happening right away, but this comes on top of the cold weather in Texas and a variety of other things. The pandemic means that empty containers are all in the wrong part of the world. I think the problem is even a couple of days delay causes huge knock on effects for things like car manufacturers and anybody else who operates in that way. I think not knowing when these products will get on the move again is what's really worrying everybody.

And presumably authorities in Egypt would be worried too. They're charging the ships that pass through, and there's no ships passing through.

For the Egyptian government, the canal is a big source of foreign earnings. A ship the size of the ever given, it might be $700,000 in tolls to go through the canal. And the country's been doing all it can to attract more business to the canal. So in 2015, Egypt spent $8 billion on an expansion project to cut waiting times. Some bits of the canal now have sort of two lanes, a bit like a motorway, but sadly not the bit where the boat is jammed. This holdup. Shipping companies are going to have to think about what to do. Already last year, some vessels were taking the more circuitous route via the Cape of Good Hope. That was made possible because although it takes a week longer, very cheap fuel last year made it more attractive. The blockage might now force ships to go around that route, which will add costs and time.

But do you think the sort of revealed fragility of the Suez might make more ships choose to do that? In a general sense, make the Suez a less trafficked channel.

There are certain sort of broader trends to circumvent the Suez Canal. The thawing of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. They're both investing in a pipeline which will bypass Suez that could open soon. And also not only the thawing of relationships in that part of the world, but the thawing of the Arctic could open up routes that could also bypass Suez. Shipping's a global business and I know these two places seem like a long way apart, but if you're going from Asia to North America, it could make sense. But despite ships taking alternative routes and the possibility that other ways of bypassing SES could open up in the future, the canal is going to remain an extremely important trade route for some time to come.

Simon, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the intelligence. The show's editors are Marguerite Howell and Kim Gitelson. Our senior producers are Chris Impey, Hannah Mourinho and Sam Colbert. Our producers are Stevie Hertz and William Warren. And assistant producer Jason Hoskett, with additional production help from Emily Elias, Saul rivers and Sarah McFarlane. Our sound engineer is Daniel Lloyd Evans, and our trainee is Abasoye Oshundairo. We'll all see you back here on Monday.