The institutions weakened, and so did the numbers that measure them

Bangladesh 2036, chapter 9 of 10. Contents, sources and the five numbers.

The institutions weakened, and so did the numbers that measure them

This is the section that makes the other fifteen conditional.

The governance record has one direction. V-Dem's free and fair elections index fell from 0.444 in 2010 to 0.161 in 2014, 0.137 in 2018 and 0.160 in 2022, a fall of almost two thirds. The polyarchy index fell from 0.420 in 2011 to 0.274 in 2022 and judicial constraints on the executive from 0.211 in 2010 to 0.125 in 2022. Freedom House scored 56 in 2013, 45 in 2018 and 40 in 2024. The World Bank governance indicators for 2024 place voice and accountability at the 36.5 percentile, government effectiveness at 39.3, regulatory quality at 39.9, rule of law at 40.4 and control of corruption at 25.5. Transparency International's index reads 23 for 2024, the lowest in the country's record, from 28 in 2017.

The state's own capacity indicators moved with them. The CPIA rating for quality of public administration fell from 3.0 in 2010 to 2.5 in 2024, with a floor of 2.0 from 2020 to 2022. The CPIA rating for revenue mobilisation fell from 3.0 to 2.0. Budget transparency fell from 58 in 2012 to 30 in 2021, then recovered to 37 in 2023. The 2023 survey scored public participation at 11, legislative oversight at 33 and audit oversight at 45 out of 100 (International Budget Partnership). Audit capacity also depends on what happens after findings are issued: in FY22 the Comptroller and Auditor General reported 10,537.28 crore BDT involved in observations examined by the Public Accounts Committee, of which 642.36 crore was settled, 6.1 percent, on an audit budget of 274.86 crore.

Election quality, budget transparency and administrative capacity fell together over the same fifteen years, which is why the reform agenda cannot be sequenced as economics first and institutions later.

The numbers themselves are now part of the story, and this piece has had to work around it repeatedly. The national accounts rebasing to 2015-16 changed FY17 growth from 7.28 percent on the old base to 6.59 percent on the new one, a difference of 0.69 points on a single year. The World Bank's fiscal year mapping is undocumented in the series metadata and had to be recovered by matching its 2020 and 2023 rows against BBS FY20 and FY23. The FY26 development programme is carried in the data lake as 255,267 crore BDT across 1,382 projects, while the National Economic Council approved 230,000 crore, and the revised programme was later cut again; this piece uses the approved figure and drops the lake total. The census and the World Bank differ on youth NEET by twenty points. Bangladesh Bank's own annual report gives both 200 and 250 basis points for the same FY24 policy tightening.

None of these are conspiracies. They are what a statistical system looks like when it is under resourced and under scrutinised at the same time, and the cost is a credibility discount that shows up in the price of money. The five year sovereign credit default swap estimate reproduced in IMF staff reports stood at 305 basis points in 2019, 285 in 2021, 605 in 2023 and 480 in 2024.

The digital gap is a gender gap

Bangladesh's digital story is told with the wrong denominator.

The regulator counts connections. Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission reported 186.1 million mobile connections and 129.4 million internet connections in FY23 at 105.81 percent teledensity, with 161,966 kilometres of optical fibre and 98.2 percent area coverage. The ITU series that the World Bank carries counts people: 30.38 percent used the internet in 2019, 41.62 percent in 2022 and 53.42 percent in 2024.

The census counts households and individuals, and it reads lower than both. In 2022, 30.69 percent of people aged five and over had used the internet in the previous three months, and 55.90 percent had a mobile phone for their own use. Among those aged 15 and over, 46.58 percent of men and 27.77 percent of women had used the internet, a gap of 18.81 points, and 84.16 percent of men and 56.43 percent of women had their own mobile phone, a gap of 27.73 points.

Internet use among people aged 15 and over runs from 18.4 percent in Panchagarh to 61.0 percent in Dhaka, so the digital economy has a geography as sharp as the remittance economy, and it is the inverse of it.

Financial access is going backwards on the demand side survey. The Global Findex records account ownership at 52.81 percent of adults in 2021 and 43.28 percent in 2024, a fall of 9.5 points. In 2024, 82.39 percent of adults owned a mobile phone, 91.33 percent of men and 73.70 percent of women, but only 61.47 percent had a SIM registered in their own name, 74.00 percent of men and 49.30 percent of women. Half of Bangladeshi women use a phone registered to someone else, which is the mechanism that keeps digital identity, credit history and formal savings out of reach.

The rails are real even so. Mobile financial services registered accounts reached 238.68 million in 2024 from 125,506 in 2011, though only 88.89 million were active, 37.2 percent. Transactions ran 1,737,411 crore BDT, 34.7 percent of GDP, while balances held in those accounts were 0.26 percent of GDP. Internet banking volumes rose from 137,384 crore BDT in 2021 to 1,109,278 crore in 2024, a factor of eight. There are 822,726 agents and 19,829 ATMs.

A payments system moving a third of GDP a year on accounts that hold a quarter of a percent of GDP is a transmission system, not a savings system, and women are locked out of it at the SIM registration step.

The export side of the digital economy has not arrived. Computer and information service exports were 527.79 million USD in FY17, 618.50 million in FY21 and 740.89 million in FY25, 8.79 percent of service exports, a compound growth rate of 4.3 percent a year. The 2021 target set in the ICT Division's own plan was 5 billion USD. The outturn missed it by a factor of eight. ICT goods were 0.05 percent of goods exports in 2015 and high technology goods 0.54 percent of manufactured exports in 2018. The innovation index rank was 130 of 142 in 2013 and 106 of 133 in 2024.

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Sources for every figure in this chapter are listed on the contents page and in the series source ledger.