Bangladesh’s current state of inequality may be worse than official surveys suggest, says a global report which notes that authorities have not taken “decisive actions” to stop widening disparity.
Bangladesh is 16th from the bottom or 142nd overall in terms of public service, according to ‘Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index’ (CRII). It has covered 158 governments around the world.
This report, released by Oxfam on Friday, observed that the South Asian countries are doing “far too little” to fight inequality. India, Nepal and Sri Lanka have found themselves among bottom 10 countries.
The CRII report mentioned that Bangladesh spends little on health, just 5.04 per cent of total government budget.
Lower spending leads to inadequate public health services and people are forced to pay out of pocket for getting essential health services, the report added.
Bangladesh has achieved remarkable growth – 6.0 per cent on average in the past decade – which, however, witnessed rising income inequality. In Bangladesh, gini coefficient of income, a measure to represent inequality, rose from 0.458 in 2010 to 0.482 in 2016.
“The actual inequality picture may be worse as household surveys mostly fail to capture information from ultra-rich households,” read the report.
It pointed out that Bangladesh has made some strides to improve social indictors but has not taken decisive actions in introducing policies to fight rising inequality.
Titled ‘Fighting in the time of Covid-19’, the new global index shows “catastrophic” failure to tackle inequality that left majority of the world’s countries woefully unprepared for the pandemic. It blamed “very low spending on public healthcare, weak social safety nets and poor labour rights” for the situation.
The Bangladesh chapter of the report read that some progressive measures were introduced during the Covid-19.
It, however, mentioned that social protection spending was “extremely low” at 6.14 per cent of the budget in 2019. Only 33.4 per cent of Bangladesh’s old age population is beneficiary of pension while this ratio is 100 per cent for the Maldives.
In the country of 165 million, some 24 million people are included in the social protection schemes, the report mentioned.
It called labour policies poor in Bangladesh, where the majority of workforce is engaged in informal work without social protection and access to quality public services.
The country ranks among the bottom 10 countries on labour and union rights, at 148th position.
The Oxfam report emphasised that Bangladesh should continue its steps taken during the Covid-19 response to expand social protection benefits and coverage and sharply increase its spending on health and social protection and ensure that more of all its social spending gets to the poor by improving transparency and accountability.
