ChapterPDF Available

Urbanization Management and Emerging Regional Disparity in Bangladesh: Policies and Strategies for Decentralized Economic Growth

Authors:

Abstract

Citation: Khondoker, Bazlul Haque, Syed Naimul Wadood and Shubhasish Barua (2011), “Urbanization Management and Emerging Regional Disparity in Bangladesh: Policies and Strategies for Decentralized Economic Growth”, Chapter 2, pp. 55-188, in Mujeri, Mustafa K. and Shamsul Alam, eds., “Sixth Five Year Plan 2011-2015, Background Papers, Volume 4: Cross Sectoral Issues”, Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies and the General Economics Division, Planning Commission, Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, ISBN: 978-984-33-3090-3
A preview of the PDF is not available
... On average, 1.74% of the firms were using natural gas for production purposes. Khondoker, Wadood, and Barua (2011) mentioned that there is a considerable regional disparity in terms of the availability of natural gas in Bangladesh. The lack of access to natural gas in the northern and southern parts of the country inhibited the growth of the manufacturing sector in those regions, which caused these regions to lag behind the other parts of the country in terms of economic development. ...
Article
Full-text available
The potential socioeconomic benefits of remittances remain untapped as a large portion of remittances is transferred through informal channels worldwide. In this paper, we explored the effect of the financial sector development in the home country on the preference for informal remittance channels using a nationally representative household dataset from Bangladesh along with subdistrict level data on bank branches. However, the identification of the effect of the banking network on the choice of remittance channel is challenging due to the unobserved heterogeneity problem. We circumvent this problem by using an instrumental variable (IV) approach. We found that greater accessibility to the banking network at the subdistrict level significantly reduces the use of the informal remittance transfer channels: a 10% increase in the availability of the total number of bank branches reduces the probability of using the informal channels, at least once, by 1.79% and hundi by 2.3% on average. The results are consistent and robust across different specifications and estimation methods. The main policy implication of this result is that the expansion of bank branches can enhance the inflows of remittances through formal channels and thereby can magnify the macroeconomic benefits of remittances globally.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.