student of protest which rocked bangladesh since july the 1st led to the resignation of the former prime minister sheikh hasina. well, this has battered the domestic economy with losses estimated billions of dollars. what is the economic future of bangladesh given that? no democratically elected government has been formed as of yet, what about the claims made by the former prime minister sheikh hasina that the bangladeshi coup was us revenge for military-based refusal. hi, i'm kavi, welcome to economic divide. some of the highlights of this program, we're going to take a look at the bangladeshi crisis. the nobel laureat units is in charge of the interim governments and what we can see from this is whether uh there has been any truth to the claims made by haseina. that there have been us

interference, the immediate goal, restore law and order, unemployment problem is big there, 67 of 67% of bangladeshies, 170 million people are aged 15 to 64, and you have 40% aged 15 to 24, not working with stagnant job growth, and the key industries in bangladesh, garments manufacturing, um, that's one of them, but is plaged by low wages, which is actually help build the industry. "and there are western companies that continue um the practice of slave labor. not long ago, bangladesh was held as an economic miracle. this focus on exporting textiles at apparel delivered rapid growth.

lifting millions out of poverty and winning the country's prime minister sheikh hasina, fame and admiration. now the country is in crisis mode, is combatting steep inflation and joblessness. after hasena's bloody overthrow through a student movement, muhammad yunus has been chosen to lead bangladesh an interim capacity. of

has been accused of regime change in bangladesh. time now for the social media post: first up, after 17 years, bangladesh is said to witness the swearing in of an interm government following the abrupt end of the awami league. next, us deepstate asset will now lead bangladesh. who is muhammad unis. he has been described as an entrepreneur, economist and a civil society leader, however, he's also been accused of

corruption, he's also been a recipient of us state scholarships funded by cia fronce, also won the nobel peace prize in 2006. ashok fellow is sponsored by ashok foundation which gets its funding from the ford foundation and this is not all, he has been constantly supported by important personalities in the us. it seemed as if the us establishment was ready to worsen its relationship with the of sheikh hasina government for just one citizen. who is mohammed yunus, the man who will head? intern government of bangladesh after sheikh hasina government was unceremoniously dislodged following violent coup. he is described as an entrepreneur, economist and a civil society leader. however is also been accused of corruption. he has also been a recipient of us state scholarships funded by cia fronts. he also won the nobel peace prize in 2006. the circular economy of bill and hillary clinton, unis presumed the new leader of bangladesh now or has ran maicro edit bank. a scam, well

his group got millions of dollars of aid from the us government, the world bank, etc., then he fundled some of those dollars to the clinton foundation, and finally, for all the clap trap about booming bangladesh, it is high levels of unemployment, widespread inequality and sweatshop exploitation. extractive foreign investments don't impress. if the economy fails to improve people's lives, screw trickle down, they will come out on the streets. okay, that was mixture of some of the people's views when it comes to bangladesh. let me introduce our guess for our first segment of the q&a. uh, first we have ahmed mushfiq mubarak joining us. he's a professor of economics and management at yall university. ahmed mubarak, welcome to economic divide, thank you for having me on your show. all right, this prignation of sheik hasina, as a prime minister, and then you have the subsequent takeover it said by the military, uh, it doesn't really spell a comfortable environment when it comes to the

economy or investments uh or anything along those lines. you have problems of liquidity and forex reserves. what is the state of bangladesh's economy? so uh, first uh, "it was a dictatorial regime that was pushed out not by the military but by student protesters, so this was entirely student and youth led uh the protest, um, and this regime had been in power for almost 15 years and there was a lot of increase in corruption during that period under this autocratic regime, and that has definitely posed" some problems emerging problems in our economy, so bangladesh had been doing quite well, there was a lot of one of some of the highest growth rates in the world about 6% or more in gdp capita growth, but since the pandemic and especially after the russia ukraine war,

which caused you global increases in fuel prices, that led to some currency balance the payments crises and bangladesh had to negotiate alone with the imf in january of 2023 over for. billion dollars right to stabilize now um what's been happening is that with the increase in corruption there's been pressure on the macro economy and on government debt so for example there's been big infrastructure projects you building metro line uh building highways but in all these different infrastructure projects with corruption there was a huge increase in cost of construction right some of the highest cost of construction in the world right? so now that is dangerous to the economy, just like accumulating government debt was dangerous to say the greek economy, and so the big challenge right now is to ensure macroeconomic balance and actually get a proper accounting of the health of the financial sector, in the previous autocratic

regime there wasn't sufficient transparency the in that, so that's one big challenge and then immediately given that we are in a situation of political turmoil right now, "we need to get back the confidence of importers from our country. bangladesh produces lot of ready-made garments, right, and we need to make sure that the buyers especially in the united states and in the european union, so they continue to think of bangladesh as a stable, safe source for for products, and similarly the other big earning, foreign exchange earnings mechanism in bangladesh is remittances for migrants, we need to make sure that those opportunities remain open." so those are some of the important economic challenges and i think a smaller one is uh that under the previous autocratic regime lot of money was sighoned off stolen from the country and we need to put in place mechanisms to get some of that money back and use it for uh national development. okay uh

let's bring in ahmed mushfiq mubarak. he's the professor of economics and management at yall university. welcome to economic divide. thanks for having me. looking at the resignation that. happened that's obviously thrown bangladesh into a state of political turmoil, but bangladesh's economy uh was facing that in one form or another, even though it has very high gdp growth in some respects. what is your view of the state of bangladesh's economy? yeah, thank you very much. this is very very valid question at this moment, so so if we look back little bit the bangladesh economy, then the last 22 to 26 month the economy was suffering from high food and non-flued inflation and at the same time the wage average wage increase was less than the inflation and but there are

allegations that the numbers that are produced the public numbers produced by the previous government is not accurate so there are a lot of d integrity issue in the economic statistics and the and the economic kpis, so the reality is the economy was already... suffering from from crisis, as you said, the reserve has crunched significantly over last two years and the currency that is called taka, local currency called taka has been devaluated by more than 30% of the compared to the us dollar, which is the significant standard currency in bangladesh, so as the interim government has has takeover and they are... led by nobel laureot renown professor dr. mohammed yunus who has been

significantly praised for his works in in poverty reduction around the world and also he is one of the pioneer for social business. we would see that the country will experience little bit better macroeconomic stability because there there was serious issue from banking mismanagement from illicit. money flows, money laundering and and majority of the chunk of the of the private sector loan is non-performing and those numbers is is around 23 to 24%. it's time now for the inf news section of the program. first up the legalization of cryptocurrency. this happened in russia. where it legalized cryptocurrency mining. now the new law introduced several key concepts, it included digital currency

mining, mining pools and also mining infrastructure operators. cryptocurrency mining will now be recognized as part of a turnover rather than the issuance of digital currency, and that's how it went down in russia. next, the global uh meltdown that we have seen, um, this affected many countries, but japan's nike was the one that had its worst day, um, other asian markets also plungeed, european stocks also neared six-month loss, many of them are now on the rebound, but uh, we are looking at how this unfolded after the us released this uh report showing a weeker than expected unemp or employment data i should say, the uh slump reflected deepening concerns over the overall state of the us economy, but some of these markets, as i mentioned, have rebounded, but even the rebound given the fact that it happened in very short period of time is putting speculation in the market that something is terribly wrong when it comes to the economic data that's coming out of the

us. issue that we looked at next is one that has gripped uh google for quite some time and it's about its monopoly tendencies uh, but it has now been ruled that google does have an illegal monopoly over the internet search engine. the case depicted google as a technological bully that methodically thorted competition to protect a search engine. this landmark decision, that google broke the anti-trust law marks the first major success taking on the dominance of big tech. uh up next venezuela's election uh it's things have subsided but us politicians called it a fraud the election results and the american election observers uh actually went and uh they did not think that this was uh done lawfully we witnessed several polling stations and we did not see any irregularities or anything that would point to any type of fraud or legitimacy. now this was based on the election observers, american

once who actually made the statement where they did not witness any type of fraud. the voting process, they said is much more rigorous than even that in the us. they have very good process here. those were the items we picked for our info news section. if you have any news in your part of the world with economic flavor, do send them to us. contact information is coming up. in today's show we'll be exploring who or what was behind the islamophobic riots that swept across england and the north of ireland at the end of july and the beginning of august. they organized something called the counter gihad europa conference, they had one in scandinavia and then they had one in brussels in the european parliament in 2007 and and that was effectively. beginning of weening the far right away from anti-sianism and judeophobia

and towards islamophobic and prossigns position. we have tommy robinson sharing this this lie that you know the attacker was an immigrant or a muslim, i think andrew tate also said that he was an illegal immigrant. fouler uh said he was a syrian, they're talking about european invasion and all this kind of stuff, and you know it turns out that the the attacker was teenager, it was born in cardif in wales to rwanda and parents and is christian and and regardless. just for the sake of argument, let's say it was a muslim, does that justify burning down a mosk or throwing bricks in through people's windows? time now for the in-depth section of the program, when it comes to the bangladeshi economy, many may be surprised that it is one the best performing economies in south asia in terms of gdp, but the recent protest that led to the alter of the prime minister sheikh hasina showed that bangladeshies are not that content with the state of their economy, so what's wrong? well, first let's take a look at bangladesh's economic performance. this

graph pretty much lays it out from the year 2019, moving up all the way through 2023. a high point of 7.88% in terms of the gdp growth, um, 2020 was down because of covid, and then you see the upsurge, and how it goes to end 2023 with a 6.0% gdp growth, so that's not that bad and of course the five years, as you can see over here, the way that this gdp growth is above the 5% mark all the way up to 7.88%, shows that there's an healthy economy there in this country. well, one reason for the positive gdp growth comes in its strength and major sectors. some of the sectors that we're talking about is agriculture and uh allied growth as it's called, the industrial growth, also and services growth. uh, this is led to the gdb growth that we see in terms of uh the last three bars that you see here. the reason why you have three different bars for it is because of uh some of the way that the

gdp has been incorporated with the average median, but overall these are the types of... figures that we're looking at of the three major uh sectors contributing to the gdp growth uh, but bangladesh with all of this positive gdp growth is suffering from something like unemployment, as you see here in this graph, we're looking at uh 5%, but it's basically stuck between really 4 to 6% when it comes to this economic indicator, i guess the highest going up to 5.83% the year five 2020 when covid hit. bangladesh is ranking with the south asian economies is seen here uh which is not that bad uh maldives coming in at in the first position 10.2% uh for the 2020 um year 2023 the forecast that that was made and that's uh came in at 8.2% for the actual gdp and there you can see bangladesh uh comes in behind the maldives and india 6.7% and 5.2% uh which uh

obviously shows uh the standing that this uh country bangladesh has. amongst south asian economies uh, but another thing that uh does play bangladesh is poverty. what if seninas achievements, the former prime minister has been that she was able to decrease poverty from a high of what you see 41.5% to uh 18.7%, which happened in the year 2022, quite a feet, yet that still is uh pretty high and more needs to be done to decrease that rate. the latest report indicates that there are 1 million bangladeshis. when it comes to uh their state of being at risk of poverty, and in terms of the ones that are moderately poor, that means that they are earning less than $3.65 per day. the un has had this to say about the bangladeshi economy, that economic growth cannot justify keeping workers in poverty, that the government of bangladesh must move away from its reliance

on cheap labor. cheap labor is very important because that's something they use in the garment industry, if it is to ensure a... space development, so that's what the un has had to say about that. all right, let's bring back our guests and see what they think, we have ahmed, rejoins us, he's a professor of economics and management. ahmed, welcome back to economic divide, i want to take have your take on why there are countries like russia and france are reaching out to bangladesh, and anal say the politics economics and the push for influence are all factoring in that. why is bangladesh important in that way? so bangladesh is a large country, geographically not very large, but it has a population over 150, 100, maybe 170 million people, and it's in geopolitically important location, where it's an important state that stands between india and china, two regional powers that are

trying to wrestle for more influence in the continent and and around the world. and i think we need to give credit to the students who were able to successfully conduct their protests, peaceful protests that ultimately toppled a an autocratic government that had been power for over 15 years and opposition parties could not do anything about it, so where the world failed, the opposition parties failed, we have a bunch of 18, 19, 20 year old students who who came and achieved something that was unk. and they were able to do it without any guns, any bullets, they were able to do it just from the power of their passion and their commitment to the country that they love, and i think... "there's a lot from a political science perspective, there's a lot for the entire world, other countries in asia, in africa, in latin america and and countries that are

facing political polarization in north america and europe to also learn from this, right, and i think partly their attention on the country reflects that. all right, thank you for that. let's see what is, thanks, he's an author and writer, faz ah, welcome back to economic." when we want to take a look at bangladesh and why there's interest in this country, our guest are just talked about how india and china are vying in for power when it comes to south asia, but why is there such interest in bangladesh, what stands out in terms of how you see it? the bangladesh is important because of its geographical location and because of its demographic dividend, the country is having 180 million. people and it's a big big market, so if we look look the position, geo position of the country and at the same time we compare the

shift from the global economic order and political order from the transatlantic to the transpacific, then we see that there is rising interest in bangladesh from the superpowers and regional powers, so so because the the economy, the sizeable, the economy is sizable and at the same time the gdp is is more than 450 billion dollar, if there is there is good governance, the country will definitely grow and and it will remain as a big big revenue generating source for the big economies and the other things are: like bangladesh is is is importing its its commodities and raw materials mostly from

china and india so these two countries always have growing interest on bangladesh and because from import point of view and at the same time technology point point of view the country is highly dependent on on china for. for technology like construction and it and and technical areas and at the same time the country's internal source for the energy is is getting reduced so over and over the time bangladesh is getting more dependent on the on the outside world. when it comes to the overthrow of the former prime minister sheikh hasina, not everything is black and white. bangladesh's former prime minister sheikh

hasina has now come out and blamed the us for her alster from power. she said the us removed her from power after she refused to seed control of st. martin's island, which would have allowed the us to sway over the bay of bengal by using it as a military base. the us's interest in st. martin's could be that it would help washington counter china's influence in the indian ocean, give it proximity to the bay of bengal and its maritime boundary with myanmar. another strange fact, bangladesh would be the fourth country after nepal, pakistan and sri lanka to have fallen, and their replacements are us-friendly or... kean to strengthen ties with the us. these are countries that are involved in china's belt and road initiatives.

there's no denying that in one respect bangladesh's economy is resilient, but that has come a cost and the... expense of the workers who are earning poor wages, that issue needs to be addressed by the new governments, not the interm governments, but the new democratically elected government, that is, if the us lets it, if the bangladeshicu was us revenge for military base refusal, then there will definitely be some turbulent times ahead for bangladesh. that does it for this edition of the program, hope you enjoyed it, if you have any comments, more importantly, if you have any critiques, please do send them to us, contact information is on your screen or to mine right from my entire team here in the capital tehran, it's goodbye until the next economic divide.

iran, the world holds its breath, when will iran act, what will its allies do, and what will the israeli state respond with, and will the americans join the war, and if the americans join the war, what will russia and china do about that? in other words, dear viewers, are we on the brink of not just a regional war, but world war ii, have it out

with gallowe, why don't you? لذلك نعم نحن نستشعر ثقه للامانه والمسؤوليه وهذه مسؤوليه لديها اثمان ونحن ايضا مستعدين لهذه الاثمان الشهاده في في سبيل فلسطين في سبيل الله عز وجل في سبيل كرامه هذه الامه في سبيل كرامه هذه الامه في سبيل كرامه هذه الامه.

the headlines on press tv, no and then sight, today is really geniciding gaza, at least 15 members of family, including nine children are killed in an israeli strike on central gaza. in letter to the us state secretary, nearly 130 journalists and press organizations call for an arms embargo on israel for killing media crews in gaza. and iran says the us is a partner to israel's crimes in the gaza strip and cannot be an impartial mediator.