As part of the CPD capacity building initiatives, this month’s sessions of Young Scholars’ Seminar Series (YSSS) was held on 18 February 2016 where two Research Associates of CPD presented their ongoing researches.
Mr Mahtab Uddin Ahmed presented his study titled “Wage Fixing Institution and Their Impacts on Bangladesh” and Mr Ashraful Haque Mahfuze shared the study on “Empirical Network Analysis of the SDGs: Perspective from Bangladesh”.
The Abstracts of these studies can be seen below:
Wage Fixing Institution and their Impacts in Major Garment Producing Countries:
The Case of Bangladesh
Abstract
Although the garment sector provides employment opportunities for more than 60 million workers, significant concern about low wage and poor working condition still exists in this sector all over the world. This study is a part of a cross-country study currently being undertaken in a number of major garment manufacturing countries on “Wage Fixing Institutions and Their Impacts”. Present study focuses on role of minimum wage fixing institutions in shaping minimum wages and their possible consequences on average wages and wage differentials etc. mainly on the garment sector of Bangladesh. The study tries to encompass the existing practice of wage fixing mechanism and collective bargaining and the relationship between them as well as their impact on various worker related issues. The study found that the wage fixing institutions in Bangladesh are still in the process of development. In almost each sector minimum wage uprating faced a long period of hibernation. A number of issues and concerns have come out with regard to enforcement of the minimum wage of garment workers at the enterprise level including lack of proper mechanism to identify different grades of workers according to workers’ skills, use of informal sub-categorisation within different grades, attempt to reduce wage related cost of workers and lack of awareness of workers regarding their grades. The study also found that collective bargaining mechanism is still very poor in garment industries. The trade unions are not effective enough in the minimum wage fixing and collective bargaining mechanism.
Empirical Network Analysis of the SDGs: Perspective from Bangladesh
Abstract
This paper will aim to identify the possible trade-offs, synergies, or one-directional causality of different indicators of the SDGs. The primary motive of the paper is to find which areas need more focus from the government sector, and which areas need less, in order to ensure the best possible outcome of the 2030 Agenda. The methodology that will be deployed would be identifying key indicators from all goals, conducting a time series correlation from 1991 – 2013, testing for direction of causality with the Granger Causality test, and finally constructing a network from all the indicators. The network will then be clustered to give a simpler view of indicators in synergy and indicators with tradeoffs. Finally, it will be compared to a theoretical network constructed based on literature. The research will be based on country level data from Bangladesh.