Abstract
The ready-made garments (RMG) sector of Bangladesh has developed immensely under the broad radar of the export market, and its size is beyond imagination. Unfortunately, there has been no study that explores the whole universe of the RMG sector of Bangladesh rather the story of the RMG sector often involves the export market only. The discussion of this paper intends to explore the methodology of unboxing the whole universe of the RMG sector of Bangladesh that includes small and medium-sized manufacturing and processing units that are often involved with subcontracting for other factories (producing for the export market as well as domestic market), are suppliers of the domestic market, are producers of accessories, and are providing backward linkages and associated services. The discussion addresses that along with export-oriented RMG factories there exists an unexplored and unboxed universe of manufacturing and processing units associated with the RMG sector of Bangladesh that contributes to investment, employment, trade, export, and the economy as a whole, all of which remains unaccounted for.
Highlights
The ready-made garments (RMG) sector of Bangladesh has experienced unprecedented growth while reaching to a position to contribute 80 percent of total export of country’s economy
The Economic Census 2013 (BBS 2013) reported that an estimated 71.03 percent of the products produced in Keraniganj are for local sale, while 19.70 percent are for export, and only 1.06 percent are for both local and export market
According to Bangladesh Export Policy 2015-2018, industries exporting at least 80% of their products will be considered as exportoriented industries (Ministry of Commerce 2015)
Summary
The ready-made garments (RMG) sector of Bangladesh has experienced unprecedented growth while reaching to a position to contribute 80 percent of total export of country’s economy. Due to underlying knowledge gap on the sector, previous studies could not clarify how big the sector is (in terms of the types of factories, firms and enterprises involved in the sector). The scenarios/situations/context and types of the factories, exporters and manufacturers remain unexplored. The discussion of this paper aims to address these issues leveraging the research activities of the ‘Mapped in Bangladesh’ (MiB) project The current paper is a product of the above-mentioned project
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