How global economic governance entrenches dependence for countries like Bangladesh

From Latin America to subSaharan Africa, IMF stabilisation packages in the 1980s and 1990s ushered in waves of austerity, liberalisation, and deregulation. These policies decimated public services, weakened state capacity, and widened inequality. Bangladesh now treads a similar path. In June 2025, the IMF disbursed an additional SDR 567 million (equivalent to around $884 million under the extended credit facility and extended fund facility) and $453 million via the rapid financing instrument, totalling $4.1 billion in support-a sum that, ironically, is dwarfed by the record $30 billion remitted by Bangladeshi migrant workers in FY24-25.

- BY DR FARIDUL ALAM, Visual: SALMAN SAKIB SHAHRIYAR

In the first half of 2025, Bangladesh's economic headlines have swung between cautious optimism and deepening alarm: an IMF bailout, renewed negotiations with the World Bank, calls for foreign direct investment (FDI), and an unrelenting cost-of-living crisis. Beneath these surface-level developments lies a deeper structural entrapment—an architecture of global economic governance that continues to bind Bangladesh's future to externally scripted imperatives.

At the core of this system are the Bretton Woods institutions—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank—established in 1944 to help stabilise the post-Second World War economic order. Add to them the World Trade Organization (WTO), created in 1995. Together, these institutions are now acting as enforcers of the Washington Consensus: policy prescriptions promoting austerity, liberalisation, and privatisation, often at the expense of national sovereignty and social equity. Today, this "Unholy Trinity" operates in concert with powerful actors such as the G7, World Economic Forum (WEF), and transnational corporations (TNCs), colluding closely with domestic enablers from Bangladesh's political, business, and bureaucratic elites.

This ensemble—let's call them the Unholy Trinity Plus—sustains a neo-colonial economic order couched in the language of development, reform, and global integration, essentially reproducing dependence in the Global South.

Despite Bangladesh's impressive socioeconomic resilience, it remains ensnared in this ill-conceived global architecture, its sovereignty gradually mortgaged for short-term liquidity and long-term indebtedness.

The mirage of development