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According to the report, “Consolidating and Accelerating Exports in Bangladesh” exports can grow faster, provided critical bottlenecks are addressed. Bangladesh needs to improve its trade logistics and infrastructure, increase supply of skilled manpower, and ensure compliance with Government’s labor standards.

The skills gap is becoming increasingly visible in all manufacturing sectors, and perhaps more so in the garment sector.  A high rate of rejection of final products is one evidence of this. Presence of skilled foreign workers is evidence of gaps in supervisory and management skills.  As the main vehicle for training workers, the publicly-funded Technical and Vocational Education and Training program needs to increase its relevance to better meet the needs of garments and other sectors.  More innovative ways to improve skills, such as trainee-targeted training vouchers, also need to be thought of.

The global economic landscape has evolved dramatically since 2000: developing and emerging economies have been driving global growth, new sources of development finance have mushroomed and the diversification of actors, instruments and delivery mechanisms has continued. Transformations in the poverty map and new forces on the supply side of development finance are challenging the international development architecture. This paper aims to stimulate debate on the future of this architecture. The authors project that, by 2025, the locus of global poverty will overwhelmingly be in fragile, mainly low-income and African, states, contrary to current policy preoccupations with the transitory phenomenon of poverty concentration in middle-income countries. Moreover, a smaller share of industrialised country income than ever before will potentially close the remaining global poverty gap, although direct income transfers are not yet feasible in many fragile country contexts. Against this backdrop, new institutions, business models and practices are challenging long-established ‘aid industry’ actors. Agencies providing development finance for improved social welfare, for mutual self-interest in growth and trade and for the provision of global public goods will find that, in each area, disruptors to their programmes may force a change in positioning.

Over the past three decades, as developing economies industrialized and began to compete in world markets, a global labor market started taking shape. As more than one billion people entered the labor force, a massive movement from “farm to factory” sharply accelerated growth of productivity and per capita GDP in China and other traditionally rural nations, helping to bring hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. To raise productivity, developed economies invested in labor-saving technologies and tapped global sources of low-cost labor.

Today, the strains on this market are becoming increasingly apparent. In advanced economies, demand for high-skill labor is now growing faster than supply, while demand for low-skill labor remains weak. Labor’s overall share of income, or the share of national income that goes to worker compensation, has fallen, and income inequality is growing as lower-skill workers—including 75 million young people—experience unemployment, underemployment, and stagnating wages.