Word: bangladesh
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Every morning 24-year-old Shahida Begum leaves her home in a Dhaka slum, wends her way through a posh diplomatic enclave and turns up for work at a garment factory overlooking the U.S. embassy. It's a commute she may not be making much longer. Like most of Bangladesh's 1.8 million textile workers, she has heard rumors that next year the American and European companies that buy clothes from her country will switch to Chinese manufacturers, leading to a shutdown of garment factories in Dhaka. The zero-sum math of globalization makes little sense...
...like Xu Shoucong. This past March, Xu's family organized 17 people to create a fund that rotates credit to all participants, who use the cash for anything from weddings to starting small businesses. Huis loosely resemble microfinance schemes of the kind made famous by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, and millions of people participate in Zhejiang and neighboring Fujian province. Because the pressure to repay derives from social networks that are as strong as rebar in Confucian China, borrowers rarely default. In the past, Xu has used his hui money to invest in a relative's clothing store...
...Review was often not an easy read, but people who needed to know Asia skipped it at their peril. It took equally seriously the plight of hill tribes in Bangladesh and adjustments in monetary policy in Malaysia. Under the protection of British laws in Hong Kong, it was able to deliver genuine, often hard-hitting news to readers in countries where the media had no freedom or were heavily regulated-and, until the late 1980s, that was the case in most of Asia. The Review had a discernibly expat, Hong Kong-centric perspective-Southeast Asia always seemed more important than...
...exports, and the industry supports as many as 1 million workers. In Nepal, where more than 300,000 workers depend directly or indirectly on the garment sector for their livelihood, extending the quota system "is a matter of life or death," says Prashant Pokhrel, a Nepali exporter. Experts in Bangladesh fear that anywhere from $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion of that country's annual exports could be lost, with the shock waves rippling through the nation's banking sector and the entire economy. Some 70% of Bangladeshi garment workers are women; many come from backward rural areas. If they lose...
...With time running out, South Asian countries such as Nepal and Bangladesh are warning that they could be facing disaster. On Oct. 1, they took their case to a WTO council meeting and asked for the commission of a study looking into the impact of phasing out quotas. Many South Asian countries say they're fighting unfair competition. Bangladeshi exporter Ghulam Faruq believes, like many others, that China manipulates its currency to keep it undervalued against the U.S. dollar, thereby making its exports cheaper than Bangladesh's. But even if its currency were to rise against the dollar, China would...