Introduction:

Bangladesh is a country with a total area of 147,570 sq. km. and one of the densely populated country which got independence in 1971 against Pakistan. The country as we know it today came into being in 1971 after East Pakistan’s glorious and bloody nine months battle for independence. Three-fourth of the people live in the rural areas, though urbanization been expanding quickly in the last twenty years. Our’s is an agrarian based economy and still now agriculture is the main source of employment .Climate of Bangladesh is moderate which is very fruitful for our agriculture .But in the past contribution of the agriculture sector to GDP has declined from 50 percent in 1972-73 to around 15 percent in 2004-2005. Our economic development could not flourished because of political and many other constraints. In this 21st century our economic development is going on not rapidly but gradually. But unemployment, cheap rate of wages and high rate of inflation are the main reasons behind our slow economic growth. Necessary steps should be taken against these problems. Our GDP growth is comparatively too slower than that of many developed countries which is also another type of problem. About one-third of our labor force is unemployed; they can not take part in economic activities as well as GDP growth in Bangladesh. Industrial and export sector have achieved production growth in the last five years. Bangladesh is a country which exports labor force to abroad comparatively more than that of some other countries. Low rate of wages is an obstacle behind economic development in Bangladesh. Most of the people of our country live below poverty line. In search of livelihood they forced by themselves to do any work. Due to lack of enough employment they can not get job on basis of their educational qualification. So they work in any sector with low wages. Because of high inflation rate the process of price hike in Bangladesh seems unending. Because of high inflation rate the value of our savings is decreasing which reducing our investment ability. No nation can prosper without productive activities and productive activities are not possible without adequate investment.

Review of Literature:

Development processes, rather than seeing them as a future goal or inevitable outcome of economic development. This is not only a question of social justice, but also an important contributory factory to social and economic development: in many ways, labor standards and social dialogue help to enable development

(Labor Standards Forum ,January-2010)

1) Increase in female labor supply accompanied by generation of demand for female labor in new forms of production resulted in a feminization of the labor force in Bangladesh. This has affected both gender segregation and market segmentation. Women’s primary responsibility for reproductive work, however, appears to constrain both quality of employment and returns to labor by restricting women’s full participation in market work. Moreover, unchanging gender division of labor in the household and reproductive economies carries negative implications for the well-being of women and of family members dependent upon women’s care-giving labor.(Simeen Mahmud)

2) In recent years of normal rice harvests, supply from domestic rice production in Bangladesh has essentially met domestic demand so that imports have been very small. Future supply-demand balances will be determined in part by the price-responsiveness of supply and demand, along with technical change, income growth and other factors. This paper provides estimates of the price-responsiveness of rice production (in particular, area planted to rice), and then simulates supply and demand balance for rice under alternative scenarios.(Paul A Dorosh: Quazi Shahabuddin & Muhammad Saifur Rahman2005)

3) Employment in the garment industry has definitely empowered women, increased their mobility and expanded their individual choice. But this they have achieved at the cost of their health and increased risk of harassment. Hence, the process is complex, and here is both decomposition of women’s subordination through employment in the garment industry. She suggests that on the whole there has been improvement in worker’s well-being over the period 1997. The improvement in the worker’s well-being will be sustained in future if proper policy supports are extended to the garment industry and is workers.(Salma Chawdhury Zohir:1998)

4) An alternative multi-step formulation of the utility function is proposed, as a substitute for the Atkinson based approach, without sacrificing the premise of threshold income level which happened to be a concept strongly advocated by UNDP from 1991 to 1998 but suddenly dropped thereafter due to trivial reasons. The

proposed alternative formulation is shown to be better than the Atkinson based formulation. The impact of our proposed multi-step utility function on the previous rankings of HDRs is assessed for different countries of the world.(Ravi Kant Bhatnagar :nd)

11) Growth of urban GDP is proportionately related to urbanization growth in Bangladesh. Growth of urban GDP is mainly generated positively by the growth of urban population, urban employment, and urban industrial output” (Haque and Akbar, 1992).

Agriculture provides 78 percent of employment and is unable to provide additional employment because of technical constraints. The modern urban sector is too small to absorb additional labour. The incidence of poverty is high in Bangladesh, and it is higher in rural areas than in urban areas (Rahman and Hossain 1995)

Bangladesh is a predominantly rural economy. The labour force has been growing by 2.4 percent a year, while the agriculture, industry, and service sectors can accommodate no more than 1.7 percent annual growth of the labour force.( Shahidur R. Khandker 1998)

Although poverty has fallen in recent years more than 50 percent of the rural population still lives below the poverty line. Poverty in Bangladesh is the manifestation of increasing landlessness, high unemployment, low literacy, and high population growth.

(Ravallion and Sen 1995),

Official estimates of personal income and its inequality, based on the Household Expenditure Surveys, suffer from inaccurate definition of income and inappropriate procedure for the estimation of inequality. These results show that the level of inequality in Bangladesh is lower than the official estimates suggest while the rate of increase in inequality during the period under review has been greater than is shown by official estimates. The rising inequality has largely been due to the rising share in income of certain components that are desexualizing i.e., disproportionately concentrated among the higher income groups) as well as a rise in the extent of their desexualizing effect. For Bangladesh as a whole a good part of increased inequality has been due to the sharp increase in inequality between urban and rural areas. They conclude by considering the implications of the findings for policies for poverty-reducing growth in Bangladesh.(Azizur Rahman Khan & Binanyak Sen :nd)

6) Micro credit has positive effects on savings of the participated households. The households include both program participants and non-participants. It is statistically tested that controlling income and land-ownership influence saving and has significant effect on household savings. The policy should be continue with and formalize them beyond the land-poor. ( Muhammad Abdul Latif :nd)

participation in this group-based micro credit program substantially alters the mix of agricultural contracts chosen by participating households. In particular, both female and male participation induces a significant increase in own-cultivation through sharecropping, coupled with a complementary increase in male hours in field crop self-employment and a reduction in male hours in the wage agricultural labor market, consistent with its presumed effects in diversifying income and smoothing consumption.

(Econometric analysis of a 1991-92 Bangladesh household survey )

The Role of Rural Non-farm Sector Female credit effects are larger than male credit effects in increasing sharecropping and in reducing male wage labor which is increasing agricultural

employment Patterns , self-employment, as predicted and Income formation in rural Bangladesh. (Special Issue on RURAL NON-FARM DEVELOPMENT IN BANGLADESH)

The rural non-farm (RNF) sector in Bangladesh provides employment to a large and growing proportion of the country’s labor force. The expansion of low-productivity self-employment has been the major contributing factor in the sect oral transformation of the rural labor force. While the provision of such non-farm employment has been crucial for absorbing the growing numbers of landless rural workers, the labor shift may have created some degree of overcrowding in the low-productivity non-farm activities, thus undermining the growth of overall productivity and income levels in the RMG sector. In future, if the RNF sector is to play a more dynamic role, there will have to be probably some shift of emphasis towards relatively larger-scale and higher-productivity RNF activities which are better able to respond to income-elastic market demand. (Wahiduddin Mahmud :nd)

They examine the structure of employment in Bangladesh’s rural non-farm (RMG) sector and its potential to generate sustainable employment, especially when compared with employment opportunities in agriculture. It also considers the role of labor policies, if any, in facilitating sustainable growth of productive employment in the rural areas. The paper concludes that the RMG sector in Bangladesh has grown in importance during the late 1980s. It has been contributing a rising share of employment and value added. While the rural non-farm sector is less productive than its urban counterpart, it generates full-time, sustainable employment in small-scale industry. Productivity of a number of activities is higher than the going agricultural wage rate. The household component of the RNF sector still largely consists of low-productive activities, and continues to employ a third of the rural labor force engaged in the sector. The RNF sector has barely begun the process of generating wage employment; future potential for wage employment will depend largely on the expansion of rural industries. Labor market policies have had very little impact on the RNF sector so far, since a large part of the sector consists of household activities, which remain a part of the informal economy. The introduction of a national minimum wage may, however, adversely affect the sector by increasing the size of its informal component. With increased actualization of the labor force, Government attempts to improve the rural roads network would improve the efficiency of sub-contracting, which would benefit the country.

(Sona Varma Praveen Kumar: nd )

8) The two challenges Bangladesh faces as she enters the twenty first century are: (a) rapid transition to a market oriented private enterprise economy and (b) integration in the world economy. This article deals with a few selected issues in respect of each of these challenges. The principal issues in the first category are: the reform of the financial institutions; progress and prospects of privatization and public expenditure review illustrated by case of defense expenditure. These three measures are interrelated and significantly affect the mobilization of resources for development and therefore, the rate of growth in savings and investment.

The important challenges in the field of external economic policy relate to: (a) The process of liberalization of trade and foreign exchange regime, (b) Sustained growth of exports and implications of membership of WTO and (c) Regional/ sub regional economic cooperation. The short-term adjustment problems of the highly protected domestic industry are real and should be dealt with. Preconditions of supply in the cost effective import competing and export sectors are to be created expeditiously.(Nurul Islam :nd)

9) It analyses the factors influencing women’s employment in the formal manufacturing sector of Bangladesh and takes into account both demand and supply side determinants of gender composition of employment. On the basis of data from 100 manufacturing enterprises in Dhaka city, it has been concluded that the characteristics of enterprises and the attitude of employers towards women’s employment and male employment have emerged as significant determinants of female employment in manufacturing enterprises. Among the characteristics of enterprises, the export orientation of industries has been observed to ha