Another excellent piece. Agreed on the pros and cons of both the election-time governance possibilities, and of the prospects for proportional representation.
Your comments on the weakness of local government are particularly well-made. I fear Dhaka elites fail to understand several things about how power is exercised in Bangladesh. The centralized nature of the Bangladeshi state is remarkable and in key respects historically anomalous: most other post-colonial states decentralized power in some ways. In Bangladesh, power became ever more centralized since independence. The most striking manifestation of this to me was the personalized and direct distribution of cash transfers from Sheikh Hasina to people's mobile phones. SHE HERSELF sent (or was seen to send) people money. No intermediaries, no agencies, no local politicians, nobody else was seen to be involved. It came from her to you. There is a particular quality to that kind of directness between political leaders and people. The urban middle classes I fear do not understand the kind of relationship they built with the majority of the public.
I'm against full independence of the judicial appointments. Otherwise we will wind up in the same situation as India where the judiciary gets involved in a lot of middle class populist shit. But I'm fine with an upper house being setup that just approves important appointments through super majority.
I don't think politicians can be trusted to make constitutional amendments. I think amendments to the constitution should approved by referendum. The referendum needs to passed via a double majority at the national level and a double majority at every division - similar to what happens in Australia.
I'm bunch more pro federalism than you are. Especially if there are little to no fiscal transfers between regions.
People are much more rational when it comes to voting with their feet than when voting in elections. A West Bengali voter will never vote a pro capitalist party but they are perfectly willing to move to pro capitalist states and even pro capitalist countries. Even so called moderate Muslims don't like westernisation but are perfectly willing to risk all their assets to move to a Western nation. You'd think people will see the irony in their decisions and eventually see the error for their ways, but alas, they don't.
We already have no barriers to labour mobility. Why would we want to create state boundaries? Federalising seems to me a solution in search of a problem.
Federalism will mean that different jurisdictions can compete for labour and businesses as opposed to getting handouts from the central government. Also, as I mentioned before, local government funded by local property taxes is also a good feedback loop.
Fiscal decentralisation in developing countries usually mean wastage and inefficiency, not 'compete for labour and business'. In fact, even in developed countries there is little evidence of such competitions mattering in the positive. Factors of production tend to agglomerate. Jurisdictions can completely derail that with NIMBYism, high taxes and so on. But so-called 'pro-growth' policies to attract labour and business are usually small change compared with forces of agglomeration and market dynamics. In Bangladesh, people will be moving to greater Dhaka and Chittagong no matter what constitutional set up we have.
You're being so short-sighted my friend. The benefit is not going to be immediate and the in the short run experts will espouse the virtues of centralization. But just look around the world. America, the most successful country in the world is heavily federalized. China, the most successful developing country, is also about as decentralized. Vietnam, which many people in development space say should be our role model economy, is similarly de-centralised.
To take even a South Asian example - Haryana was Punjab's shithole when it separated off into an independent state. But now it's the one of the richer Northern state.
Another excellent piece. Agreed on the pros and cons of both the election-time governance possibilities, and of the prospects for proportional representation.
Your comments on the weakness of local government are particularly well-made. I fear Dhaka elites fail to understand several things about how power is exercised in Bangladesh. The centralized nature of the Bangladeshi state is remarkable and in key respects historically anomalous: most other post-colonial states decentralized power in some ways. In Bangladesh, power became ever more centralized since independence. The most striking manifestation of this to me was the personalized and direct distribution of cash transfers from Sheikh Hasina to people's mobile phones. SHE HERSELF sent (or was seen to send) people money. No intermediaries, no agencies, no local politicians, nobody else was seen to be involved. It came from her to you. There is a particular quality to that kind of directness between political leaders and people. The urban middle classes I fear do not understand the kind of relationship they built with the majority of the public.
I need to bring back jury duty to curb the power of the judges who keep getting involved in middle class populist projects.
I'm against full independence of the judicial appointments. Otherwise we will wind up in the same situation as India where the judiciary gets involved in a lot of middle class populist shit. But I'm fine with an upper house being setup that just approves important appointments through super majority.
I don't think politicians can be trusted to make constitutional amendments. I think amendments to the constitution should approved by referendum. The referendum needs to passed via a double majority at the national level and a double majority at every division - similar to what happens in Australia.
I'm bunch more pro federalism than you are. Especially if there are little to no fiscal transfers between regions.
People are much more rational when it comes to voting with their feet than when voting in elections. A West Bengali voter will never vote a pro capitalist party but they are perfectly willing to move to pro capitalist states and even pro capitalist countries. Even so called moderate Muslims don't like westernisation but are perfectly willing to risk all their assets to move to a Western nation. You'd think people will see the irony in their decisions and eventually see the error for their ways, but alas, they don't.
We already have no barriers to labour mobility. Why would we want to create state boundaries? Federalising seems to me a solution in search of a problem.
Federalism will mean that different jurisdictions can compete for labour and businesses as opposed to getting handouts from the central government. Also, as I mentioned before, local government funded by local property taxes is also a good feedback loop.
Fiscal decentralisation in developing countries usually mean wastage and inefficiency, not 'compete for labour and business'. In fact, even in developed countries there is little evidence of such competitions mattering in the positive. Factors of production tend to agglomerate. Jurisdictions can completely derail that with NIMBYism, high taxes and so on. But so-called 'pro-growth' policies to attract labour and business are usually small change compared with forces of agglomeration and market dynamics. In Bangladesh, people will be moving to greater Dhaka and Chittagong no matter what constitutional set up we have.
You're being so short-sighted my friend. The benefit is not going to be immediate and the in the short run experts will espouse the virtues of centralization. But just look around the world. America, the most successful country in the world is heavily federalized. China, the most successful developing country, is also about as decentralized. Vietnam, which many people in development space say should be our role model economy, is similarly de-centralised.
To take even a South Asian example - Haryana was Punjab's shithole when it separated off into an independent state. But now it's the one of the richer Northern state.