Growth and Structural Change: An Overview

Abstract

The rate of GDP growth accelerated in Bangladesh since the beginning of the 1990s. The three-year average annual growth centered around 1990/91 was 4.77 percent. Population grew at 2.18 percent per year at the time so that the annual rate of growth in per capita income was 2.53 percent. The three-year average annual growth in GDP centered around 2010/11 had risen to 6.34 percent while the rate of population growth had fallen to 1.39 percent, making the annual growth in per capita income 4.88 percent, as much as 93 percent higher than what it was two decades before! Note that the rate of growth in per capita income would have been only 4.07 percent if the population growth rate had remained the same as at the beginning of the 1990s. Thus more than a third of the acceleration in per capita growth was due to the fall in the rate of population growth.