Tag: Iftekhar Rahman

The Test of Economic Accountability A decade after President Xi Jinping’s October 2016 visit to Dhaka, Bangladesh faces a more demanding test than the delivery of infrastructure: whether Chinese-backed financing has produced demonstrable public value. Approximately US$24.45 billion in prospective commitments accompanied the visit, elevating bilateral relations and strengthening cooperation under the Belt and Road…

Read More “Ten Years After Xi Jinping’s Dhaka Visit: Has Chinese Financing Delivered Bangladesh’s Economic Transformation?” »

Wahidul Islam’s recent article in The Oniket Bulletin, ‘The Hidden Bottleneck: How Credit, Banking, and Legal Gaps Are Choking Bangladesh’s Gas Imports’, makes an important case that sovereign credit deterioration, banking weakness and gaps in trade-finance architecture have constrained Bangladesh’s ability to secure LNG.1 That diagnosis matters, but finance is one transmission mechanism within a…

Read More “Beyond the Financing Bottleneck: Reassessing Bangladesh’s 2026 Gas Security Crisis” »

This article assesses whether the newly operational Invest Bangladesh Authority has addressed the institutional risks identified by The Oniket Bulletin (TOB) in its 16 July 2026 critique, Investment Agency Merger in Bangladesh: Too Big to Fail? TOB accepted the case for administrative consolidation but warned that a mega-authority could reproduce the regulatory maze behind a…

Read More “Invest Bangladesh After the Merger: From Institutional Design to Operational Resilience” »

Purpose of This Article This article examines whether Bangladesh’s auditor-independence framework is sufficiently robust to support credible financial reporting, banking-sector confidence and capital-market trust. It benchmarks Bangladesh’s existing arrangements against global independence principles, with India used only as a practical regional comparator. The focus is on whether audit independence is visible in practice through effective…

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A Manufacturing Power Without Brand Power Bangladesh has built one of the world’s most important apparel manufacturing platforms. Its factories supply major international retailers and its ready-made garment sector anchors national exports. Yet a strategic paradox remains. Bangladesh is globally competitive in producing clothing for others, but Bangladeshi clothing brands have not achieved equivalent strength…

Read More “Building Bangladesh’s Fashion Brand Competitiveness Beyond Contract Manufacturing” »

Bangladesh’s challenge is no longer simply to identify opportunities arising from global realignment. It is to build the institutional capacity to evaluate commitments, implement reforms and measure outcomes consistently. The anticipated visit of Prime Minister Tarique Rahman to China should therefore be assessed through a practical lens. The relevant question is not merely how many…

Read More “The US-China Strategic Contest and Bangladesh Part II. From Diplomacy to Delivery” »

The economic relationship between the United States and China has entered a more complex phase. It can no longer be understood simply as a conventional tariff dispute. Tariffs remain important, but the contest now extends to technology, industrial capacity, critical minerals, investment screening, digital systems and the security of global supply chains. US goods trade…

Read More “The US-China Strategic Contest and Bangladesh Part I: Navigating Opportunity in an Age of Managed Competition” »