The Story

In a few years, certainly within the 1980s, Bangladesh will have a population of well over 100 million. It will remain one of the lowest income countries in the world, and, barring major upheavals or revolutionary changes in its social and political outlook, it will remain the test case of economic development by combined internal effort and external assistance. Foreign aid commited to Bangladesh in the 1970s is likely to exceed US$ 8 billion; in 1977–8 alone it reached $1200 million, most of it as grants or on concessional terms. While aid on this scale to a single country represents a significant share of the world’s total foreign assistance, the sums are not large by other standards: the annual net resource flow to Bangladesh is roughly twice the loss made in a bad year by the British Steel Corporation, and of the same order as the annual investment outlays by individual major transnational corporations. While the income supplement represented by foreign aid at current levels may average up to 15 per cent for the population in Bangladesh, it could be financed by Norway alone at the cost of a mere 3 per cent to 4 per cent of its national income, i. e. little more than the increase within a single year in the standard of living of that small but rich country.