Despite economic progress and considerable success in the improvement of a range of social indicators, consolidation of democracy in Bangladesh has remained quite elusive.

This week, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) announced that it would not participate in the forthcoming national elections, thereby creating a potential political deadlock. This decision to boycott the polls has come in the wake of a series of violent clashes between the BNP and the Awami League (AL) supporters, strikes and violent demonstrations. Against this backdrop, it is difficult, at this stage, to tell if this announcement was mere political grandstanding or not. Unfortunately, regardless of whether or no...

AFTER a decade of negotiation between the US and Bangladesh, TIFA has recently received a new name — Trade and Investment Cooperation Forum Agreement (Ticfa). Only in four cases the name TIFA varied and became Trade and Investment Cooperation Forum (TICF), Trade and Investment Development Cooperation Agreement (TIDCA), Framework Agreement for Trade, Economic, Investment, Technical Cooperation (FATEITC). Whatever the term is, these are the precursors for the US to have complete bilateral trade and investment (BTI) agreements with its strategic allies.

In northern Bangladesh, a 17km-long industrial conveyor belt carries in limestone from a mine on the other side of the border with India. It feeds a cement-making factory, which ships its output down a river to the capital, Dhaka. There the stone—mined in India and processed in the Bangladeshi hinterland—becomes, block by block, part of one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. Your correspondent had always wanted to see this conveyor belt, not least to find out if a customs officer is there to man it. But those plans were swiftly pushed to the side by another, even more tantalising idea. Apparently, back in 1994, North Korea’s late dictator, Kim Jong Il, deployed his own country’s miners to a different bit of northern Bangladesh—to help to develop a mine there. This is a mi...