Garments and Growth

The book provides an empirically rich analysis of Bangladesh’s economic transformation through globalization, with particular focus on the emergence of its globally competitive garment export industry. It emphasizes the crucial role of internal ideational factors within the state, arguing that policy learning—driven by key technocrats and political executives—was central to designing strategies that enabled industrialization and export-led growth.

Challenging conventional narratives that attribute policy reforms primarily to external pressures from international financial institutions, the book highlights how endogenous political agency and state-led planning facilitated the rise of the private sector. The garment sector, in particular, became a catalyst for socio-economic transformation, advancing women's economic participation, enhancing household incomes, and contributing significantly to GDP growth.

Drawing on a political economy approach and the framework of historical institutionalism, the book traces the evolution of policymaking across successive governments. It demonstrates how internal ideas, institutions, and strategic decisions—rather than external imposition—shaped the country’s development path.

This book will be of great interest to policymakers, economists, scholars of international political economy and development studies, policy and business schools, and those focused on the dynamics of export-led growth and industrial transformation in emerging economies.

• Explores the evolution of policy learning in Bangladesh through the concept of the policy committee—a unique contribution to governance studies in the Global South.
• Analyzes technocratic ideas and political agency in facilitating garment exports and driving socio-economic transformation in a post-aid agrarian society.
• Offers a nuanced account of political decision-making and state–society interactions in public policy formation.