Motivation: The urgency and
scale of mass adult immunization for COVID-19 presents a huge challenge for any low- and middle-income
country (LMIC) like Bangladesh. Our analysis focuses on demand-side constraints early in the vaccination
campaign to help gauge vaccine acceptability and potential contributing factors. Identifying registration
and compliance challenges early on will help ensure a seamless immunization programme.
Purpose: We seek to identify subgroups who may need specific interventions by comparing willingness to
be vaccinated and registration behaviour, and to understand how actual registration and take-up decisions
compare between rural areas and urban slum areas.
Approach and Methods: We use data from three surveys conducted between late January and early September
2021. The article includes a nationally representative survey on vaccine acceptability and a study on
vaccination rollout behaviour in rural and urban slums.
Findings: Willingness was not an issue in Bangladesh, but the challenge was getting individuals to
register. Once they did, compliance was very high. When the information gap regarding registration was
addressed by campaigning, registration and take-up increased. Confidence in public service delivery
influenced favourable responses to mass immunization efforts. Women were falling behind initially in terms
of both registration knowledge and completion. Online registration needed to be complemented with
alternatives. Social networking was a vital source of information and encouragement.
Policy implications: Communication strategies are necessary to inform the public at an early stage, and
these should provide information about registration eligibility and detailed registration instructions.
Ensuring and sustaining service quality is also beneficial. In LMICs like Bangladesh, low-tech intensive
registration methods are required. Information campaigns about the registration procedure should
specifically target rural communities and women. Community-based mechanisms may reduce transaction costs and
increase confidence.
In Bangladesh, despite increased participation in the labour market in recent decades, women are still
lagging behind men by a significant margin, with the former being concentrated chiefly in low-paid
agriculture as well as in the lower stages of the occupational ladder. With the help of the latest labour
market data of 2016–2017 coupled with 2011 census data, this article attempts to examine gender segregation
through sectoral and occupational lenses. Our econometric estimation of different sectors (agriculture,
manufacturing, construction and service) reflects the importance of gender-centric factors such as care
burden and marital status along with local employment opportunities in constraining women’s labour market
engagement. Besides, decomposition analysis highlights that unfavourable returns to endowments play a
crucial role in females’ concentration in relatively low-productive sectors. Sectoral and occupational
segregation indices reflect a high degree of segregation between men and women. Thus, against the backdrop
of the concentration of women in low-skilled jobs and a low-productive sector, this article expects to
provide important policy insights for boosting female employment in relatively high-productive sectors and
high-paid occupations while utilizing the structural shift in the labour market of Bangladesh.
With deep-seated gender
imbalances prevalent in Bangladesh, it is compelling to understand how those women, who do manage to get
employed, are faring in terms of equity. A popular approach involves analysing the gender wage gap across
the entire distribution. With the assistance of the latest data from QLFS 2016–2017, the gender wage gap is
decomposed, with selection issues addressed by Buchinsky (J Appl Econom 13(1):1–30, 1998) method. The paper
has then proceeded to posit the existence of a strong sticky floor effect and a weaker glass ceiling effect
in Bangladesh, with discriminatory rewards to observed characteristics being the dominant feature of the
observed wage gap across the entire distribution. Women face discrimination at the bottom end chiefly due to
differences in returns. On the other hand, women at the top are subject to extensive discrimination despite
being superior to men in terms of endowment. Consequently, low-earning women require access to jobs which
reward their skills as much as their male counterparts; the same holds true for the high-income group. There
is also evidence of selection bias for both genders. Policy prescriptions based on these findings and
potential avenues for further scope concerning the paper are also mentioned in the end.
An early version of the paper was originally presented at the 15th South Asian Economics Students’ Meet
(SAESM), held in Colombo, Sri Lanka, January 2019, where it had won under the theme of “Gendered Work
and Gender Equity”.
The paper constructs a model
to show the relative welfare reductions of the new poor, who are less agile in their shock response compared
to the old poor, in the presence of addictive habits and temptation. Addiction to a previous better
lifestyle differentiates them from the old poor and leads to lower adaptability in behavior during the
initial stages of an economic shock. The new poor households, provided that they do not either go cold
turkey or regret and rectify their actions, lose out from four channels:(i) fewer resources to consume in
the pre-shock period as they save up for the shock period;(ii) growing addictive behavior due to their
failure to adapt;(iii) temptation goods increasing ‘impatience’or first-period consumption, raising
addiction and increasing the latter’s consumption share as the new poor’s consumption levels fall; and,
perhaps most importantly,(iv) a dwindling share of the essential normal good from this multitude of effects
during an economic crisis.
This paper explores the
public sentiment of Bangladeshi residents concerning the lockdowns imposed by the Bangladeshi government in
2021 in response to COVID-19. Through open-ended question design and analyses of natural language using NLP
and sociolinguistic techniques, we show detailed, nuanced sentiments as well as common themes and
discussions these sentiments are seated. Additionally, using a range of discursive analytical measures, we
explore the interactions between enumerators and participants in live survey conditions, providing
alternative methods to and potential field guidance for enumerator survey methods.
The social and economic
impact of COVID-19 has been deep, wide-ranging, and multi-dimensional. While anecdotal evidence of distress
among the poor, particularly those with informal occupations, has been widespread, effective policy response
has required real-time, researched data disaggregated for urban and rural populations and for various
categories of the poor. The Power and Participation Research Centre and BRAC Institute of Governance and
Development’s four-round panel survey during 2020–21 provides unique insights into how COVID-19 impacted
specific categories of the poor and vulnerable in Bangladesh, their coping strategies, and the extent to
which policy support materialized. While the poor as a whole demonstrated their agency in the face of the
crisis, their resilience has been as much about deepening vulnerability as about recovery, representing an
unfair burden of distress resilience. Informal workers, women, and the urban poor have been
disproportionately impacted.
This BIGD study examines the
impact of COVID-19’s impact on the major economic and financial indicators of the economy of Bangladesh,
including production, wages, price levels, advances, bills, investments, remittances and foreign trade,
using the secondary data published by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), Bangladesh Bank (BB), and
the Ministry of Finance (MoF). In addition to the recent impact of the global economic meltdown, Bangladesh
also experienced severe demand contraction in the local economy; this exacerbated the overall economic
crisis of the country. Considering the duration and severity of COVID-19, we examine its impact on major
economic and financial indicators of the Bangladesh economy and recommended policy responses for recovery,
based on the analysis. Both domestic and international demands declined due to the outbreak and subsequent
lockdown, and, thus, producers responded by lowering output to minimize the loss, especially in the
manufacturing sectors. Findings reveal that the nominal Wage Rate Index (WRI) in the industry and service
sectors fell in recent times, which now appears to be recovering. The national inflation rate has not been
affected much based-on point-to-point changes. Food inflation fell in May 2020 and stood at 5.09 percent,
but it appears to have risen recently. Non-food inflation rates have been falling over the last six months
since April-September 2020. Prudent measures should include constant monitoring and adapting to the latest
developments in major trading partners and host countries to mitigate the economic losses caused. Bank
credit would play a key role in the ongoing and upcoming recovery process, as the government has opted for a
credit-led stimulus package.
Various activities undertaken
by the government include widening coverage of the social safety nets to protect the poor and the new poor
due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite such an increase in social protection coverage and spending amid
COVID-19, many of the poor are still excluded due to the lack of a social registry and proper implementation
and distribution strategies. This study aims to critically scrutinize the Bangladesh government’s support
under the umbrella of social protection during COVID-19 in order to assess the social justice agenda based
on a systematic inquiry to look at the secondary data. It also tries and identifies the drawbacks, which are
rooted in the existing social protection framework, associated with the planning, designing, programming,
and delivery of the various social protection programs and projects in order to ensure social justice from
the rights, governance, distribution, and access perspectives. More specifically, the scoping study would
help highlight the caveats of Bangladesh’s social protection during pandemics and identify the scope of
future research and policy actions to mitigate the potential impacts of future shocks on the livelihoods of
the poor, marginalized and impoverished people by constructing a comprehensive and dynamic social protection
system.
The report discusses the major
findings on the educational life of rural and urban slum-dwelling children in Bangladesh during COVID-19,
based on two rounds of surveys in March and August 2021. The data was collected as part of a larger study
that has been tracking the livelihoods of the citizens in rural and urban slums since the pandemic hit the
country. The larger study is a collaborative effort between the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development
(BIGD) and the Power and Participation Research Centre (PPRC). Poor quality of education was a grave concern
in Bangladesh even before the pandemic, and the long school closure during COVID-19 has worsened the quality
problems. Early into the pandemic, research by BIGD indicated the likelihood of significant learning losses
due to schools closing. In this phase of the joint study by PPRC and BIGD, the authors examine the learning
loss trend, the role of mother’s education in learning loss risk, digital inclusion in remote learning
methods, the mental health of primary and secondary schoolchildren, and the indirect effects of the
pandemic, such as the high incidence of child labour. Male students in secondary school were found to be at
the highest risk of learning loss, possibly due to the livelihood pressure induced by the pandemic.
