ABSTRACT
Bangladesh achieved remarkable progress in alleviating poverty in the 1980s and 1990s (BBS 2007; Hossain and Sen 1992; Ravallion and Sen 1996; Sen 2003; World Bank 2007a). The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) estimated from the Household Income Expenditure Survey (HIES) that the incidence of poverty in rural areas fell from 55 percent in 1985-6 to 44 percent in 2005. Independent analysis by scholars using standard methodology on the BBS data confirmed that poverty incidence declined by 1 percent per year during 1982-2000 (Sen 2003) and by 2 percent per year during the 2000-5 period when economic growth accelerated to 6 percent per year compared with 4 percent per year over the previous three decades. If Bangladesh can accelerate its economic growth further to about 7 percent per year, it will be on the way to achieving the Millennium Development Goal on halving severe poverty (World Bank 2007a).
