Moving Forward: Connectivity and Logistics to Sustain Bangladesh's Success

The erosion of its competitiveness is raising concerns about the sustainability of Bangladesh's growth model based on exports of ready-made garments. To safeguard its comparative advantage in ready-made garments and diversify its exports basket, Bangladesh needs to increase its competitiveness. Improving logistics performance is an important lever with which to do so. Moving Forward: Connectivity and Logistics to Sustain Bangladesh's Success presents a comprehensive assessment of logistics performance and its main determinants. It analyzes freight demand at a spatially disaggregated level, quantifies logistics costs, including the costs of externalities, looks at the factors that determine the stock and quality of infrastructure, and examines the incentives to provide logistics services of a certain type and quality and to charge the observed prices. It also quantifies the potential impacts of removing transport and logistics inefficiencies on Bangladesh's exports and economic geography using a spatial general equilibrium model. Bangladesh's congested, unreliable, and unsophisticated logistics system imposes high costs on the economy. Making it efficient requires a holistic system-wide approach that is based on a comprehensive strategy; improves the quality, capacity, and management of infrastructure; improves the quality and integration of logistics services; and achieves seamless regional connectivity. Moving Forward will be of interest to policy makers, private sector practitioners, and academics with an interest in the performance of Bangladesh's transport and logistics sectors.