Bangladesh’s growth has been remarkable, but is now at risk

give some bread to get the starving fed? We’ve got to relieve Bangladesh,” sang George Harrison, a former Beatle, in 1971. His pleading was warranted. No sooner had local politicians declared the independence of the eastern half of Pakistan (as Bangladesh had previously been) on March 26th of that year than the Pakistani army initiated a brutal war to crush the separatists, at a cost of somewhere between 500,000 and 3m lives. The fighting, along with devastating floods and cyclones, had turned the new country into one of the most destitute spots on Earth.Fifty years on, the improvement in the lives of ordinary Bangladeshis has been remarkable. In 1972 per person was almost 40% lower in than in Pakistan. Now it is more than 40% higher. The economy was growing by around 8% a year before the pandemic struck—the fastest pace in Asia. The country’s proliferating garment factories provide a decent livelihood for millions. By the World Bank’s reckoning, Bangladesh has graduated from “least developed” to “developing” or “lower middle-income”—a huge advance on the wasteland of 1971.