Working abroad has been a clear path to comfort and riches for Bangladeshi men for over twenty or more years. Mass migrations of a generation of young men to the Middle East and South East Asia have propped up Bangladesh’s economy through long spells of dictatorship and democracy. Throughout that time, remittance payments have been […]
South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) is a regional grouping comprising of eight states- Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Maldives and Sri Lanka. Nine Countries – Australia, China, European Union, Iran, Japan, Myanmar, Mauritius, South Korea and U.S. – hold Observer status. 25 years ago in 1985, SAARC was initiated with the dream […]
Anyone who’s been following the politics and political economy of Bangladesh knows that remittances are a strong and important driver of the domestic economy. Over the last 30 years, the rate of annual growth of remittances has averaged about 19%. This is an impressive rate of growth and as such, it is engine of […]
NPR takes a road trip along the Grand Trunk Road
The BNP has just announced that on May 3rd, it will lead a protest march to the election commission to demand a that the voting results of the Bhola-3 elections be annulled. Further, the BNP will demand that the electoral commissioners resign. I understand that all protests are extra-legal acts and– taken together–movements. But this […]
The reportage in the course of the day presents a slightly more nuanced take on the government shut down of the private Channel 1 television station. On the one hand, though the channel has gone through several iterations of leadership and journalistic talent, the news programming certainly was less frivolous than other outlets. On the […]
The last few days have seen significant uproar in the Indian parliament and media about the alleged wire-tapping of four senior politicians in India. The Outlook Magazine reported that telephones of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, CPI(M) General Secretary Prakash Karat and Congress General Secretary Digvijay Singh were tapped by […]
The Awami League government has now shut down another television station in the span of less than six months. This is the second such censorious clamp-down since the Awami League returned to power in December 2008. This is a troubling move, for the official excuse for the revocation of the license to broadcast seems like a […]
An interesting aspect of India’s defense strategy today is its focus on increasing its naval power, currently the fifth largest in the world. Last month, the Woodrow Wilson Center hosted a panel to discuss this “dramatic maritime transformation.” Within the next decade, the country plans to introduce 40 new warships and 400 new aircraft to […]
The Commerce Ministry of Bangladesh was set to lift a ban on public commercial import and exhibition of Indian films in Bangladeshi cinema theaters. That move will now be scrapped. The Commerce Minstry was set to lift a ban placed on exhibitions of Indian films in 1972 to nurture Bangladesh’s then nascent film industry. […]
Richard Samuels and Robert Madsen have a thoughtful piece on US-Japan relations in The National Interest, in which they push for a “limited liability partnership”: “a cooperative scheme in which Tokyo’s military role is scaled back significantly and the U.S. presence in Japan is rendered less onerous.” The strength of the article lies in its […]
Malaysia: PM Najib Razak has launched an economic reform initiative, the New Economic Model (NEM), which is geared to transform Malaysia into a developed nation by 2020. The problem with this lofty goal is that Malaysia is currently facing ascending competition, a marked decrease in foreign direct investment (FDI), and the fact that this reform […]
Popular from Press
