Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the poorest of them all? When Bangladesh emerged as an independent country in 1971, it was arguably the poorest country in the world—or close to it. Today, the country is still poor but growing rapidly. Real economic growth exceeded 8 percent in 2019, and although the coronavirus crisis has slowed the pace, growth is expected to continue at a more modest pace of around 4 percent in both 2020 and 2021. Bangladesh’s estimated 2020 GDP per capita of $1,888 now places the country far above many of the desperately poor countries of tropical Africa with which it used to be compared. And it puts Bangladesh exactly one spot above neighboring India in the latest economic league tables from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
When the news broke, the Indian press went wild in a paroxysm of angst, finger-pointing, and denial. In Bangladesh, the response was more measured. In China, unsurprisingly, the state-run media blamed India’s fall from grace on “the Indian government’s refusal to rectify relations with its neighbors” and its recent ban of Chinese social media apps. The international press hardly noticed at all, although Bloomberg’s Andy Mukherjee did chide India for not promoting low-wage manufacturing exports as Bangladesh has, citing a paper from the economists Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian. But even if India stole all of Bangladesh’s low-wage exports, it would create barely a blip in India’s GDP figures. India doesn’t need more low-wage jobs. It needs higher incomes for ordinary workers, both in rural areas and in urban slums, and these can only come from economic reforms that benefit the millions, not the millionaires.
