The paper analyses the impact of the steep rise in oil prices that has taken place since 1973 on the terms of trade, balance of trade and the capacity to pay for imports out of export receipts of Bangladesh. It shows that the country would have faced a deteriorating terms of trade even in the absence of such a rise in oil prices, but this phenomenon has made things much worse for her. Not only her terms of trade deteriorated severely, her major exports suffered a setback and the reduced capacity to pay for imports led to a shrinking of the volume of crucial imports. The additional cost of imports due to higher oil prices was also quite substantial in relation to the country’s GDP, its growth and exports. Thus the rise in oil prices seems to have made substantial contributions to the country’s impoverishment during the seventies. 

The present paper argues that though foreign resources play an important part in initiating and sustaining development, their importance has been over-stressed in the so-called two-gap models of foreign aid, as expounded by Chenery and Strout, Mckinnon, and others. In this paper it is shown that by designing appropriate policies on the domestic front, the critical importance of foreign resources can be relaxed to a significant extent. In particular, the present paper emphasizes the role of wage policy and the need for human resource mobilization for a labour-surplus economy. The paper also sketches out the paths of dual gaps for a labour-surplus economy and shows that policies ensuring appropriate wage growth can affect both types of gaps to a significant degree. 

This paper formulates and, to an extent, practises an extended empirical framework for meaningfully examining certain structural aspects of input and product markets in cotton weaving industry of Bangladesh, using firm-level data. The study finds, inter alia, that input markets are imperfect with significant price variations arrayed against small-scale producers, but that the presence of merchants who seek to maintain the status quo leads to a partial neutralisation of the adverse price variation effects. The study further finds the cloth market to be product-differentiated.

Male mortality is known to be lower than female mortality in South Asia in the normal times. But it has also been observed that during the crisis periods, this ordering is reversed. The experience of the 1974 famine of Bangladesh, as analysed in this study, confirms this reversal of relative mortality rates. But the usual explanations offered for this reversal are not borne out by the data pertaining to Bangladesh. Several other alternative explanations are explored, but cannot be confirmed due to the lack of appropriate data.