Supply Chains

Workers preparing the ground for the site office
on November 27th, 2012

We are still in Dhaka, our departure to Naogaon has been delayed for another week or so, and there is another hartal today. It did not appear to me to be very well-supported however. I saw a considerable number of private cars, buses and Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) green scooters (a.k.a baby taxis or auto-rickshaws) on the road as I walked to the office for my lunch. 

Flicking through 'The Daily Star' newspaper, I came across this interview with Doctor Khondaker Golam Moazzem (who received his doctorate from one of Japan's top universities, Kyoto University) In the article, 'Development of supply chain for different sectors is important',  he discusses why Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Bangladesh is rather low in comparison with other countries.

He mentions the problems that investors typically face in the pre-establishment phase of a project, and they all sounded very familiar to me. It is no surprise that the problems he lists, particularly those concerned with supply chain logistics, make it extremely difficult for private companies to conduct successful ventures in Bangladesh.

New acronyms that I encountered in the article include "LDC" which stands for Least Developed Country. As I recall, Bangladesh was formerly referred to as being a developing country, but in the 21st century, the definitions have become much more precise. According to Wikipedia, Bangladesh is one of forty eight countries classified as a LDC by the United Nations (2011) because it meets the three criteria below: 

1. Poverty (three-year average Gross National Income per capita of less than US $905, which must exceed $1,086) to leave the UN's list,
2. Human Resource Weakness (based on indicators of nutrition, health, education and adult literacy), and
3. Economic Vulnerability (based on instability of agricultural production, instability of exports of goods and services, economic importance of non-traditional activities, merchadise export concentration, handicap of economic smallness, and the percentage of population displaced by natural disasters).

I remembered from my Chittagong days that an "EPZ" is an Export Processing Zone. But Double Taxation Agreement (DTA) and  Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) were new terms for me. I had fun researching the concepts behind these acronyms. It is not a very Christmassy activity but it does keep my mind happily engaged, which in my book, is the equivalent of receiving a special Christmas gift any day.