It's just low base effect. I mean with the huge deficit over time BD has run with india (even just sticking to goods alone, forget service trade)...there has to be some pent up reverse force from the weakening effect this has on BD liquidity pressure.
I mean just look at comtrade:
View attachment 577013
Thats like average of 9% growth for India-->BD on a base 10+ times higher. This basically resulted in last 4 year period seeing an absolute increase of 2.5 billion USD for India ----> BD compared to increase of 370 million in other direction....i.e the absolute difference increased 2.2 billion in India's favour (of already huge disparity in trade).
So you can quote whatever low base effect you want to (and you can see wild negative swings in opposite direction in certain years for BD due to same low base effect), doesn't really matter given the longer term trend and magnitude of disparity.
Heck you can go to earlier years and see as far back as 2006...India was exporting roughly same disparity it imported ratio wise (8 - 10 times) w.r.t BD:
View attachment 577014
But the actual surplus was just 1.4 billion back then given the levels.....now its nearly 8 billion USD. Add services (huge one way direction of tourism, medical services etc)...even more billions get added to India's favour.
This all illustrates what a low base effect is and why its dumb to quote a country suffering from that (and also terrible export diversity) in just one year.
You are just an non-competitive country, period. To do anything structurally to change that, you not only need to attract far more FDI than you do, you also need to invest outside your country at far greater rate than you do.
The fact Vietnam in most recent year invested 600 million outside its borders, whereas Bangladesh TOTAL investment stock (i.e over all years) is just 300 million (and lately decreased from previous year) and in the most recent year just scrounges up 23 million to invest outside....shows you guys are really behind where it matters in structurally changing anything.
https://unctad.org/sections/dite_dir/docs/wir2019/wir19_fs_vn_en.pdf
https://unctad.org/sections/dite_dir/docs/wir2019/wir19_fs_bd_en.pdf
So forget about
comparing with countries like India and Indonesia that have magnitudes more in these actual structural levers and volumes that matter.
Thus you have reality like 1000 USD exports of refrigerators to indonesia (and 150k to world at large) to celebrate and it simply not going to change much at all. But I guess you can make some repetitive farticle each month on cue as you want to....to add to growing list from years past of naming some "pick from a hat" countries/destinations but never the realised amounts you actually achieved in the end.
@Marine Rouge