Enabling diasporas of
LDCs to transfer knowledge to invest in home
countries would lead to their long term economic
growth- suggests UNCTAD’s LDC report 2012-2013
launched by CPD
Dr. Tasneem
Siddiqui is presenting the UNCTAD's LDC Report 2012
while Dr Debapriya Bhattacharya and Professor Mustafizur Rahman
are paying attention
CPD launched the UNCTAD’s Least Developed Countries’
report 2012, titled 'Harnessing Remittances and
Diaspora Knowledge to Build Productive Capacities'
on 26 November 2012 in the CPD office. It may be
recalled that CPD has been a partner of UNCTAD for
the global launching of this flagship report since
2006. Professor Mustafizur Rahman, Executive
Director of CPD and Dr Debapriya Bhattacharya,
Distinguished Fellow, CPD were among the notable
panelists of this launching event while Dr. Tasneem
Siddiqui, Chairman of the Refugee and Migratory
Movements Research Unit (RMMRU), and Professor of
the University of Dhaka, was invited to present the
report. A large number of representatives from the
print, electronic and broadcast media also attended
the launching program. The panelists also responded
to the various questions and queries from the media.
This report had drawn attention to the positive
roles that diasporas could play for the economic
growth of the LDCs. This could be done through
transferring their specialized knowledge and
investing in productive capacities. As the report
said there are about 2 million skilled professionals
from the LDCs living abroad. This large number of
skilled migrants could potentially act as sources of
development finance and channels of knowledge
transfer and facilitators of trade and market access
opportunities in the host countries.
The report also revealed that remittances also
constitute a significant source of external
financing for the LDCs and it’s growing every year.
Remittances help sustain livelihoods and contribute
towards poverty reduction and create educational
opportunities for the family members. However,
remittance flows also give rise to inequality and
sometimes lead to exchange rate appreciation.
The report, in fact, argued that the full potential
of the diaspora knowledge and remittances cannot be
extracted unless there exist effective policies in
the country to mobilize these for the economic
productivity. Professor Mustafizur Rahman pointed
out that there is a lack of efforts to include the
Bangladeshi diasporas in the various economic
policies and investment initiatives of the country.
Dr Debapriya Bhattacharya stressed on building trust
between diasporas and home governments to better
engage and motivate the highly-skilled expatriates
with the country’s economic activities. Dr
Bhattacharya also urged the government to add the
term ‘diaspora’ with the “Ministry of Expatriates'
Welfare and Overseas Employment”.
The UNCTAD report came up with a number of policy
recommendations for the LDCs particularly in
relation to the diaspora knowledge and remittances.
The report recommended for pragmatic and
context-specific policy approaches to encourage
greater participation of the LDCs’ diasporas in the
financial investment in their respective countries
to increase the productive capacities of the economy
and leverage resources. This report also strongly
recommended for reversing the concept of ‘brain
drain’ to ‘brain gain’ as the highly-skilled
expatriates are the sources of enormous potential
for building knowledge network and channeling
financial investment. Their skills could be
harnessed for building the human capacities through
education, training and networking, the report
added. The report further recommended for lowering
the costs of remittance transaction to increase the
remittance amount, offering preferential interests
and other incentives to diasporas, and establishing
proper channeling in the banking and other financial
service sectors to facilitate investment which would
in turn have impact on the economic development of
the country.
More....
