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The erosion of its competitiveness is raising concerns about the sustainability of Bangladesh's growth model based on exports of ready-made garments. To safeguard its comparative advantage in ready-made garments and diversify its exports basket, Bangladesh needs to increase its competitiveness. Improving logistics performance is an important lever with which to do so.Moving Forward: Connectivity and Logistics to Sustain Bangladesh's Success presents a comprehensive assessment of logistics performance and its main determinants. It analyzes freight demand at a spatially disaggregated level, quantifies logistics costs, including the costs of externalities, looks at the factors that determine the stock and quality of infrastructure, and examines the incentives to provide logistics services of a certain type and quality and to charge the observed prices. It also quantifies the potential impacts of removing transport and logistics inefficiencies on Bangladesh's exports and economic geography using a spatial general equilibrium model.Bangladesh's congested, unreliable, and unsophisticated logistics system imposes high costs on the economy. Making it efficient requires a holistic system-wide approach that is based on a comprehensive strategy; improves the quality, capacity, and management of infrastructure; improves the quality and integration of logistics services; and achieves seamless regional connectivity. Moving Forward will be of interest to policy makers, private sector practitioners, and academics with an interest in the performance of Bangladesh's transport and logistics sectors.

Competition --- Competitiveness --- Congestion --- Connectivity --- Economic Geography --- Exports --- Freight --- Freight Flows --- Logistic Costs --- Logistic Services --- Logistics

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The trade performance of countries in South Asia over the past two decades has been poor relative to other regions. Exports from South Asia have doubled over the past 20 years to approximately USD 100 billion. In contrast, East Asia's exports grew ten times over the same period. The low level of intraregional trade has contributed to weak export performance in South Asia. The empirical analysis in this paper demonstrates gains to trade in the region from reform and capacity building in trade facilitation at the regional level. When considering intraregional trade, if countries in South Asia raise capacity halfway to East Asia's average, trade is estimated to rise by USD 2.6 billion. This is approximately 60 percent of the total intraregional trade in South Asia. Countries in the region also have a stake in the success of efforts to promote capacity building outside its borders. If South Asia and the rest of the world were to raise their levels of trade facilitation halfway to the East Asian average, the gains to the region would be estimated at USD 36 billion. Out of those gains, about 87 percent of the total would be generated from South Asia's own efforts (leaving the rest of the world unchanged). In summary, we find that the South Asian region's expansion of trade can be substantially advanced with programs of concrete action to address barriers to trade facilitation to advance regional goals.

Common Carriers Industry --- Congestion --- Costs of Transportation --- Free Trade --- Freight --- Freight Flows --- Industry --- International Economics & Trade --- Port Authorities --- Public Sector Development --- Trade Policy --- Transparency --- Transport --- Transport and Trade Logistics --- Transport Costs --- Transport Economics, Policy and Planning --- Transport Sector --- Transport Systems