Weathering the Storm: Bangladesh's Economy Amid Global Turmoil

Grocery prices have made everyone angry this year, myself included. Soybean oil, rice, everything costs more than it did eighteen months ago, and I'm not going to sit here and tell people struggling to feed their families that everything is fine. It isn't, not entirely.

But context matters. The war in Ukraine sent fuel and food prices climbing everywhere, not just here. Sri Lanka defaulted entirely. Pakistan went to the IMF twice. Compare that to where Bangladesh stands, still making debt payments on time, still keeping subsidies flowing on fuel and fertilizer so farmers aren't crushed by the shock. The government's decision to negotiate an IMF facility early, before things spiraled the way they did elsewhere in the region, was the kind of unglamorous, responsible governance that doesn't make headlines but matters enormously.

I'm not going to pretend price controls and subsidy management are exciting topics for a blog post. But when I look at what could have happened to this country given the same global shocks other nations faced, and where we actually landed, I think this government's economic team deserves more credit than the nightly news gives them. Nobody thanks you for the disaster that didn't happen.