Abdullah Shibli

Dr Saadat Husain, former chairman of Bangladesh Public Service Commission, passed away on April 22, 2020.

The pandemic and its economic impact will be felt very strongly by the poor.

"Corona-virus can’t tame Bangladesh’s growth momentum”, declared a report issued by the Ministry of Finance of the country. Strong domestic demand fuelled by growth in the flow of remittance and increased public expenditure will counter any possible external shocks, according to the report, which was sent to the Prime Minister’s Office. In other words, the Prime Minister will receive a very rosy picture for the rest of the year, so far as the domestic economy is concerned.

Abhijit Banerjee, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019, made his mark with some early work on corruption in government.

There can be no doubt that the process of digitalisation is affecting almost all aspects of the world economy. This all-encompassing transformation, mostly in the realm of activities around digital communication and digital media, has brought about a wide-range of changes in our economic and social universe.

A recent news item caught my attention— “High Court directs the University Grants Commission (UGC) to submit a report on PhD approval process”.

Jeanine Cummins, the author of the latest American best-seller novel “American Dirt”, is taking a lot of flak for her story based on the experience of a Mexican woman named Lydia and her eight-year-old son who flee their home and cross over to the USA.

As the UK prepares to leave the European Union on January 31, there are two important issues still unresolved: the monetary cost of Brexit, and the future of UK’s trade relations with the EU.

It was the winter of 1995, or maybe 1996. Let me only say that it was a memorable moment for me, a quarter of a century ago in the city of Dhaka.

Two recent trade pacts—one between the US and China, and the other among US, Mexico and Canada—have given the economists plenty of reasons to worry.

The outcome of Britain’s recent parliamentary elections should not come as a surprise to anyone. The British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party had sought a clear mandate from the people to “get Brexit done”.

Americans celebrate Thanks-giving Day (on the last Thursday of November) for many reasons but personally, I look forward to this holiday for the opportunity to reflect on the happenings of the past year, and to plan for the next one.

Last week, for the first time I heard an eminent Burmese citizen and a former advisor to the military government admit that massacre and atrocities were committed against the Rohingyas. He also acknowledged that Rohingya villages were burned in Rakhine.

Bangladesh has made phenomenal progress in the last two decades in terms of improving the standard of living of the masses.

Thirty-nine migrants seeking a better life perished in a refrigerated van, and their bodies were found in an industrial site about 25 miles east of central London.

Bangla-desh has expressed its interest to participate in next year’s SDG voluntary national review (VNR) which will be placed before the UN in July 2020.

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to a trio who came from three different continents to teach and work together in Cambridge, USA. Abhijit Banerjee hails from India, Esther Duflo grew up in France, and Michael Kremer was born and brought up in the USA and finished his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard. Their research focuses on poverty alleviation, and more specifically on the design of policy to guide development practitioners and government.

In Ian McEwan’s “Sweet Tooth”, a novel based on the social life of London in the early 1970s, we see a vivid description of conditions that prevailed in the UK which was then facing several crises on different fronts, and was completely torn apart by industrial and social unrest with slowing economic growth and rising unemployment.

In most countries in the world, barring a few, poverty appears to be a dirty word. Even in rich countries such as the USA and UK, it is difficult to find any reliable statistics on the existence of poverty, the level of poverty, or a headcount of poor people. It has recently

At some of the conferences on Bangladesh held in the USA, particularly at Harvard University, I have noticed that introductory speeches often mention Henry Kissinger and his infamous remark about Bangladesh being a “basket case” or “bottomless basket”.