An Analytical Survey of Population and Development in Bangladesh

Arthur, W.B. & McNicoll, G. (1978). An Analytical Survey of Population and Development in Bangladesh. IIASA Professional Paper. IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: PP-78-008

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Abstract

This paper is titled an Analytical Survey. As a survey it sets out to collect and pull together what is know from the many studies and detailed aspects of population and development in Bangladesh. And as an analysis it sets out to make sense of a complex situation, to pick out the various economic, social, demographic and environmental forces that shape Bangladesh's present predicament and set the bounds for its future possibilities.

Two particular problems call for special attention in an analysis of Bangladesh. Agriculture measured relative to other Asian countries, has achieved little in the last decades that could be called dynamic progress. And human fertility, a generation after mortality has declined, remains high with little sign of falling. The source of both problems we seek in the social structure of rural Bangladesh, in the particular incentives this structure gives to those who control it, in the legacy of underadministration and underinvestment left by the country's colonial past, and in the extreme lack of security faced by a population that lives in a crowded and uncertain environment.

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