In many developing countries, electricity prices, subject to controls by public sector monopolies, are significantly distorted. This in turn gives wrong signals to investigate the desirability and induces inappropriate technology choice. This paper attempts to investigate the desirability and feasibility of price reforms and divestiture with reference to the electricity sector of Bangladesh. In particular, it discusses the analytical and empirical issues relating to estimation of shadow prices of electricity uses and analyzes the impact of price reform on government revenue and income distribution. Since, electricity generation, transmission and distribution in Bangladesh are fully controlled by a public monopoly, characterized by inefficiency in its operations and chronic financial loss, a second element of the reform examined in the paper is the divestiture and privatization of some of its operations.
The paper makes an attempt to assess the effects of economic incentives on the responsiveness of exports on the basis of a brief review of structure of incentives and export performance. The Study relates to the period 1976/77 to 1991/92 covering sixteen years for total exports and 1981/82 to 1991/92 for commodity sector due to non-availability of certain information required for the analysis. These incentives may be broadly categorised under monetary ad fiscal policy instruments. The paper demonstrates that foreign income is an important explanatory variable for export performance. for total exports, all the economic incentives such as exchange rate, relative price, export performance benefit, rate of interest, foreign income, custom duty, sales tax, excise taxes and refunds have the expected signs and are significant. The results differ significantly for different commodities. While interest rate is negatively associated with exports of raw jute, readymade garments, handicrafts and paper products. Fiscal instruments seem to be important for engineering products, paper, newsprint and paper products to influence exports. Exchange rate depreciation have a positive effect on exports of most commodities Relative price does have a role in jute goods’ exports.
Employment is supply determined in situations of full employment. In situations of underemployment, however, employment is determined by demand related factors. In such cases the labour supply function and the determinants of employment need to be analysed separately. The labour supply curve for female workers in some villages of Bangladesh was found to be horizontal (up to a point) at a given wage rate. However, the amount of employment was negatively related to wage rates because wages influenced employers’ consideration. The elasticity of employment with respect to wage rates was less than unity and thus earnings of low wage workers were lower. Some previous studies of the situation in Bangladesh and India have interpreted this negative wage employment relationship as a supply function showing negative wage elasticity. Such an interpretation is misleading and can have undesirable policy implications because there is evidence of underemployment in those study areas and in that case the relationship between wage and employment does not depict supply considerations.
The assumption of “uniform flow of internal migration” used in Rahman (1987) is generalised in this paper for cases when the flow of internal migration is increasing or even decreasing. In particular, the cases when the migration rate is proportional to the national population or to the regional population are analysed. Procedure for estimation of the migration rate and the pure migration are given. The formula for prediction of population is also provided. As an application of the procedure, migration to the Dhaka SMA is analysed with the help of Census Data.
