An engine of growth

In a broader sense, the government has to redeem on the unfinished agenda for building up tertiary growth centres linked to utility services, communications and marketing networks as though they were the arteries of a countrywide infrastructure. This is a long term perspective which needn't have sounded so futuristic if we had started out on fast-track infrastructure building early on. By now we would have had something to rapidly industrialise on.

At any rate, in most pressing and immediate terms what the entrepreneurs of small and medium-sized units need now are financial assistance, entrepreneurial consultancy, and access to appropriate technology and export markets. So making financial support conditional upon demanding satisfaction on the entrepreneurs having built the infrastructure amounts to taking away by the left hand what is proposed to be given by the right hand. Actually it is a self-defeating formula.

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Of course, with all our resource constraints, we cannot afford to spoon-feed would-be entrepreneurs but let's not forget that our prime policy objective is to create new entrepreneurship. Sustaining and expanding enterprises already in the business and which are being quite contributive to the GDP growth are no doubt a major policy preoccupation; even so, the thrust ought to be on facilitating the advent of new enterprises if we are to diversify exports beyond the confines of RMG and shrimp sectors, the first one being under pressure anyway. Bangladeshi products now have zero tarrif access to EU market. To exploit such opportunity in full measure we can think of no other alternative than to bolster industrialisation along the SME lines.

Importantly, the industrial policy should be geared to cater for mitigating such problems as corruption, flawed tax system, delays in port and customs clearances which the enterprises face on a routine basis as revealed in a survey of the World Bank and the Bangladesh Enterprise Institute.