Rehman Sobhan

This paper attempts to trace the roots of the governance problem in Bangladesh to the structural features of its polity. These features include the existing politics of confrontation, weaknesses in the practice of parliamentary democracy, the malfunctioning of political parties, the role of money and muscle power in politics, and the rent-seeking collusion among the political parties, state machinery and vested commercial interests. Efforts for improving governance must be directed towards persuading political parties of the advantages of reforms in the existing political institutions. The paper also advocates civic actions in creating widespread awareness of the benefits of better governance, thus raising the political costs of malfeasant governance.

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Down and Out in Outer Mongolia-Lessons for Economic Reformers for 1995

Vol. 30, Issue No. 10, 11 Mar, 1995

Rehman Sobhan

While eastern Europe has been the hardest hit because a system, put in place over many years, which had guaranteed the basic needs of the citizens, was dismantled in rapid order under the diktat of the IMF and World Bank driven by the western countries, the crisis of living standards posed by economic reforms is by no means unique to post- socialist Europe. As the world moves into 1995, what conclusions do we draw from yet another year of failure of market reforms to restore sustainable growth to most of the third world?

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Structural Maladjustment-Bangladesh s Experience with Market Reforms

Vol. 28, Issue No. 19, 08 May, 1993

Rehman Sobhan

Structural Maladjustment Bangladesh's Experience with Market Reforms Rehman Sobhan Bangladesh's reform programme remains in deep crisis because it has, over a decade, failed to accelerate growth, diversify the economy, stimulate investment and domestic savings and create the basis for a sustained growth process which can lead to greater self-reliance and substantial reductions in mass poverty. It may be convenient for the IMF and the World Bank to blame successive governments in Dhaka for their failure to implement reforms and for current Bangladeshi regimes to attribute the poor results to the malfeasance of their predecessors. But a decade of economic stagnation needs more substantive and less self-serving diagnosis if Bangladesh is to join the ranks of a resurgent South Asian region, let atone its more dynamic neighbours to the east.

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Rethinking the Market Reform Paradigm

Vol. 27, Issue No. 30, 25 Jul, 1992

Rehman Sobhan

Rehman Sobhan There is an extensive literature and debate on the conceptual merits of the World Bank's diagnosis and solution of the economic crisis of the third world. The time is now right to bring this conceptual debate from the margins of academia into the mainstream of both academic and political discourse. This paper, which briefly reports on what has happened to the developing economies in the 1980s in the wake of market reforms, is designed to provide the rationale of contemporary experience in the third world for reopening this debate.

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Politics of Food and Famine in Bangladesh

Vol. 14, Issue No. 48, 01 Dec, 1979

Rehman Sobhan

Countries like Bangladesh are, even in normal times, vulnerable to pressures applied by donors of aid like the United States, and more so when they are faced with the prospect of natural or manmade famines, and when the aid sought is food. Such pressures have generally been related to specific issues of economic policy, though no doubt having political implications. In the situation of acute famine that prevailed in Bangladesh in 1974, however, the United States used food aid to exert political pressure pressures which were to bear fruit in the political changes that were brought about in August 1975.