Measure development by wellbeing, not numbers
Bangladesh has made considerable progress in terms of economic development, catching attention of many global thinkers, said Prof Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a member of the Council of Eminent Persons of the Malaysian government.
“The growth is quite impressive.”
But, he said, the numbers are not enough to measure economic development.
“The nation needs to look at the contents of growth and measure economic development in terms of wellbeing or quality of life of people,” he told The Daily Star in an interview recently.
A leading economist and expert on political economy of development, Sundaram came to Dhaka last week to deliver lecture on implementation challenges of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to food, energy and inequality.
Educated at Yale and Harvard universities, Sundaram served as an assistant secretary-general of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
In his lecture, Sundaram stressed the need for reduction of malnutrition and micronutrient deficiency to attain the SDGs.
He said Bangladesh has made progress in recent decades, but that progress has been reversed in recent years and the proportion of hungry people has actually increased.
During the interview, he repeated the problem of malnutrition, micronutrient deficiency in the country. “I hope there would be no hungry people in Bangladesh.”
He also said Bangladesh should look at why its citizens are eating less vegetable and fruit.
Sundaram, also a visiting fellow at the Columbia University, USA, said it is good for Bangladesh to grow at a good pace. But for its future, it is important to have more balanced economic development, including industrialisaion.
“And this is going to be a major challenge as you graduate from the LDC [least developed country] status,” he said, suggesting policymakers think what are the areas Bangladesh can industrialise and how it can succeed in industrialisation.
He cited Bangladesh's dependence on garments, saying there were more than 200,000 people producing garments in Malaysia 30 years ago. Today, less than 15,000 are working in the industry.
Those factories have gone to China, Vietnam and Bangladesh.
“As Bangladesh becomes more expensive, as workers get higher income, they might be going somewhere else from Bangladesh,” he said, asking Bangladesh to look at where its strength lies.
He, however, lauded Bangladesh's success in generic drugs manufacturing.
“This is a great achievement. Just if we measure things simply in terms of the monetary value, it may not seem a lot.”
But in terms of well-being, the ability to get medicine at much cheaper prices from Bangladesh will be very important in the long run, he said.
This was the fourth visit of Sundaram to Bangladesh. He first came to Dhaka in 1996 and when he was asked to comment on the change he saw between the two visits, he said: “When I came in 1996, I do not remember being caught in traffic jams for such a long time. But when I came in 2011, traffic jams were bad. Now it is worse.”
A lot of vehicles on the road do not mean that everybody is better off, he said.
“It means a lot of pollution and we all are breathing fumes. I think it is very important for Bangladesh to look at the description in terms of the future so that society as a whole is better off.”
He said people will rely less on private transport if there is a good public transport.
He suggested Bangladesh focus on generating more energy from renewable sources.
Photovoltaic solar panels and wind turbines have become economically very viable especially as petroleum prices are going up, he said. “And this needs encouragement.”
He said renewable energy sources have created opportunities to leapfrog and people who do not have electricity should go straight to renewable energy, not fossil fuels.
Sundaram said fossil fuel is contributing to climate change, which will hurt countries like Bangladesh and the Maldives badly.
Many people of Bangladesh live in low-lying lands, the Sundarbans and other areas which will be affected by climate change.
Another very important issue is extreme weather, which the world has never experienced, he said.
“So, we have to recognise that the world has changed. Our environment has changed and we need to pay much more attention and make more effort to try to address some of these problems.”
Sundaram, a recipient of the Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought, said inequality among the rich and poor countries is one of the reasons behind migration.
“People are moving not because they are workers; they are moving to become workers in other societies because they are going to be paid more.”
He said people who have small businesses are ready to give up their profession to become workers in other countries to earn more.
On the crackdown on undocumented foreign workers by the current Malaysian government, Sundaram said the last deputy prime minister of Malaysia was allegedly trying to bring 1.5 million Bangladeshi workers into Malaysia and the rumour was that the contract was given to his brother to import workers.
About 10 companies in Bangladesh were given the rights to recruit the workers. That agreement has now been suspended, he said.
He hopes in the future a new agreement will make sure that the recruitment is free of corruption and in the interest of workers, not contractors.
Sundaram said many Bangladeshis come to Malaysia by spending a lot of money, but they do not earn enough after they arrive. Even after two years, some of them feel that they have not even made the savings they were hoping to.
So, they stay illegally although they have less protection, weaker bargaining power and less income, he said.
According to the economist, out of about 7 million foreign workers, only 2 million are documented, and many Malaysian employers are taking advantage of a large number of foreign workers to weaken the bargaining power of the workers.
Employers refuse to mechanise and invest in better equipment and they employ foreign workers to do dirty jobs Malaysian workers despise to do, he said.
“You have to eliminate this type of situation. So, we do not want the foreign workers to become the enemies of Malaysian workers. If we really need workers from abroad, they are welcome. They must be well treated.”
Sundaram shared his thoughts on democracy and development. He said many say that people would change governments when an economy performs badly.
“I do not think so. Even when the economy is doing well, people change the government,” he said, citing the recent change in governments in South Korea and Malaysia.
