As Bangladesh continues its journey towards economic restructuring, it is imperative to create jobs that provide dignity and security for its people.

Agriculture accounts for approximately 13.6 per cent of Bangladesh’s GDP and employs more than 40.6 per cent of the labour force. As technology advances, so do agricultural applications, ushering in a new era of industrial upheaval.

To improve medium-term growth, China must heed the lessons of its own history and focus on removing barriers to market entry and entrepreneurship. An economy’s growth rate comes from a combination of an increase in the average size of existing firms (intensive-margin growth) and an increase in the number of firms (extensive-margin growth). A study of the Chinese manufacturing sector that I co-authored with Xiaobo Zhang suggests that during the last few decades, extensive-margin growth accounted for about 70 percent of overall GDP expansion.

According to the latest Labour Force Survey by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), employment in the industrial sector for the current fiscal added a mere 300,000 people over the last seven years (an average of 42,857 jobs per year).