Bangladesh Is Clothes-Minded

Bangladesh is feted for its robust growth performance over the last three decades, sterling record of poverty reduction, and well-above-peer-level performance on many health, education, and demographic outcomes. Given its abject poverty at the time of its independence in 1971 and poor rankings on cross-country governance indicators, these achievements have together been labeled a “development surprise.”

A big part of Bangladesh’s success story comes from labor-intensive, export-oriented industrialization. It boasts the biggest manufacturing sector (as a share of GDP) in South Asia, and it continues to grow. In 2001, Bangladesh’s merchandize exports amounted to $6.6 billion; in 2019, they were $47.2 billion, more than doubling its share of world exports from 0.1 percent in 2001 to 0.25 percent in 2019.

But this export-driven success story comes from an extreme concentration in garment manufacturing: The share of garments in Bangladesh’s total exports increased from 75 percent in 2000 to more than 86 percent in 2019. For a single