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Trade liberalisation should follow proper assessment

Speakers say at BIDS workshop

STAR BUSINESS REPORT
The government should go for trade liberalisation after proper assessment of its impact on Bangladesh economy, speakers at a workshop observed yesterday.
The speakers were speaking at the concluding session of a two-day workshop on 'Trade Cooperation and Economic Policy Reform in South Asia'. The workshop was organised by the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS) in Dhaka.
Mirza Azizul Islam, former division chief of ESCAP, said the competitive edge of Bangladesh is now better and the export level has also increased but its is still low compared to other developing countries.
As the industries in the export processing zones (EPZs) contribute 16.5 per cent of the total exports of Bangladesh they should get
considerable attention, he added.
Islam said high transport cost is an unavoidable barrier to trade and it significantly hinders development of trade. "Bad infrastructure increases the transport cost and, thereby, inhibits trade."
MA Taslim, chairman of Tariff Commission, said free trade is needed but the question is to what degree Bangladesh should liberalise its foreign trade with its trading partners.
As tariffs are coming down globally Bangladesh has also reduced its tariffs from a high level of 350 per cent to a reduced level of 32.5 per cent.
He said Bangladesh and other developing countries are being marginalised in world trade. Before the introduction of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the least developing countries performed 0.7 per cent of the total world trade. This has reduced to only 0.4 per cent after the introduction of WTO.
Taslim said that the average tariff that Bangladesh pays to USA is 14.7 per cent while the average tariff that USA pays to Bangladesh is 3.77 per cent. This is because Bangladesh has a small basket of export goods while its exports from USA are mostly machines, intermediate goods and computers which have very low or zero level of tariffs, he said.
He said that the least developing countries (LDCs) are at a disadvantage in world trade as barriers to their exports have increased while the barriers to their imports have declined.
Moksad Ali, former member of the Planning Commission, said the cost of trade liberalisation in Bangladesh has to be assessed. He said that trade liberalisation may divert domestic demand from the consumption of locally produced goods to the consumption of imported items. This will adversely affect the local industries and retard their growth, he added.