The Right to a Job, the Right Types of Projects: Employment Guarantee Policies from a Gender Perspective

There is now widespread recognition that in most countries, private-sector investment has not been able to absorb surplus labor. This is all the more the case for poor unskilled people. Public works programs and employment guarantee schemes in South Africa, India, and other countries provide jobs while creating public assets. In addition to physical infrastructure, an area that has immense potential to create much-needed jobs is that of social service delivery and social infrastructure. While unemployment and enforced idleness persist, existing time-use survey data reveal that people around the worldespecially women and childrenspend long hours performing unpaid work. This work includes not only household maintenance and care provisioning for family members and communities, but also time spent that helps fill public infrastructural gapsfor example, in the energy, health, and education sectors. This paper suggests that, by bringing together public job creation, on the one hand, and unpaid work, on the other, well-designed employment guarantee policies can promote job creation, gender equality, and pro-poor development

Trade and linkages using input-output approach: an empirical investigation of Bangladesh

Employing a variant of the open-static Leontief model and a 53-sector input-output table, the paper identifies a variant of the key sectors in the Bangladesh economy in terms of trade linkages. The concepts of gross and net linkages are introduced and the analysis is extended to both current (flow) and capital (stock) accounts. On the gross linkage criterion, only a handful of sectors emerge as key sectors with three or more linkages. These sectors are from within the manufacturing and services categories. This is also the case with sectors having two strong linkages. Agricultural sectors do not feature at all. The findings suggest that Bangladeshi export sector is typically undiversified in that it relies heavily on agriculture and related industries, with jute and jute textiles accounting for over 70% of net export earnings. Most sectors in the industrial complex are net importers and the domestic production of industrial goods is highly import-intensive. -from Author

Changes in the crop sector of Bangladesh: a review of performance and implications for policies

Since the late 1960s, there has been an increase in the incidence of multiple cropping and a decline in net cultivated area, and changes in the cropping pattern and output mix. Output of foodgrains increased, primarily through a moderate increase in rice production and a phenomenal rise in wheat production. One of the important contributions of new technology is the increase in annual yield of crops even though seasonal or varietal yields have fallen. There have been important inter-regional disparities within this picture of overall crop growth.-from Author

Comparative Advantage in Bangladesh Crop Production

This study uses data from 1996/97 through 1998/99 to examine the relative efficiency of production of crops in Bangladesh and their comparative advantage in international trade as measured by net economic profitability (the profitability using economic, rather than financial costs and prices), and the domestic resource cost ratio, (the amount of value of non-tradable domestic resources used in production divided by the value of tradable products). The economic profitability analysis demonstrates that Bangladesh has a comparative advantage in domestic production of rice for import substitution. However, at the export parity price, economic profitability of rice is generally less than economic profitability of many non-rice crops, implying that Bangladesh has more profitable options other than production for rice export. Several non-cereal crops, including vegetables, potatoes and onions have financial and economic returns that are as high as or higher than those of High Yielding Variety (HYV) rice. The relatively minor role in cropping systems of these crops despite their higher returns, can largely be attributed to high price risks associated with marketing, suggesting the need for further development of agro-processing industries, rural infrastructure, and marketing networks. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS 1

Consumption, Savings and Investment by Social-Class in Bangladesh - Does the Rural Sector Support the Urban Sector

This article employs input-output analysis and information from a social accounting matrix and the concept of net savings to examine savings, consumption and investment behaviour by various social classes in Bangladesh in urban and rural areas. Considerable differences between social classes can be identified in all three respects. A majority of the social classes in the rural sector does not appear to generate enough savings to sustain its consumption whereas the urban social classes do. There seems to be little difference in consumption pattern of the rural rich and the urban rich. There is considerable urban-rural difference in the import intensities of consumption. The findings of this study based on the Hazari model do nor establish the existence of urban bias but the problem seems to be one of 'rich-bias' rather than urban-bias per se. However, the Hazari model cannot capture all possible sources of urban bias and circumstantial evidence indicates concentration of advantages in the urban areas