Sustainable Growth and Bangladesh's Prospects of Long-Term Prosperity

Abstract

At the beginning of the 21st century, the United Nations introduced a development initiative called Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which contained eight targets for less developed member nations for continuing development efforts and enjoy better livelihoods of the backward regions of the world implemented over 2000 and 2015 (Hossain 2010, UNESCAP, 2019). Given the mixed achievement in attaining the eight targets at the conclusion of the MDGs, the United Nations adopted a second plan of action in September 2015 called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for all member nations, with 17 goals to be achieved between 2016 and 2030. These are also known as the 2030 Agenda (UN 2015). In the middle of implementing the SDGs, suddenly the world was turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, likened to a once-in-a-century human-to-human transmitted virus. The World Health Organization (WHO), the lead global health sector agency of the United Nations, declared COVID-19 a pandemic on 11 March 2020 (WHO, 2021). The pandemic has spread all over the world, with confirmed cases of infection close to 110.7 million, out of which 2.4 million deaths have been recorded on 23rd February 2021 (WHO 2021). The pandemic has contributed to a majority of individual country economies going into recession, with the exceptions being nine nations, including two large Asian nations: China and Bangladesh. In view of the above, this monograph has investigated Bangladesh's ascendancy in socio-economic terms, keeping in mind the performances under MDGs and SDGs from 2000 to 2019. Given Bangladesh's solid progress over the last ten years (2009–2019) and now in the middle of a pandemic, this volume examined the prospects of keeping prosperity sustained until Bangladesh's goal of becoming a middle-income nation by 2031, one year after the SDGs program concludes. It must be remembered that the SDGs program was commenced in 2016 and only eight years remaining to the 2030 deadline. The million-dollar question is, when will the pandemic end? The impacts of COVID-19 on Bangladesh's economy are hard to predict since the rolling out of vaccines in this region remains slow, but continuing satisfactorily till today.