Positions available: One Student

Dynamics of Agricultural Productivity, Economic Growth and Nutrition Security in Bangladesh

The purpose of this study is to examine the growth of agricultural productivity, economy, and nutrition situation in Bangladesh with the existing policy and political situations. Then, with the disintegration of the agricultural sector into crops, livestock, fisheries, and then further disintegration of the crop sector into different crops for nutrition purposes, this stud is expected to related food production with economy and nutrition. The specific questions to be asked are:

· How the agricultural productivity, in general, and specific sectors and crops performed in the last half a century?

· Does agricultural production relate to economic growth?

· Do acreage, production and yield of different crops grow in the same rate?

· Have the existing policies been biased toward certain crops or certain agricultural sector?

· What are the relationships between the growth of agricultural production and nutrition security in Bangladesh?

· What role international trade payed in improving food security in Bangladesh?

· Are there any room for further improvement food security through policy prescription and implementation?

· What policies need to be improved, modified, and incorporated in improving food and nutrition security in Bangladesh?

Methods:

This project is to be executed using the secondary data. At the first stage, this project will collect secondary data and relevant literature. The source of secondary data are the websites of the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United Nations Population, the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), the Open Street Map (OSM), the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS), the Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWSNET), and the Sustainable World.

Time-series data on agriculture, economy, food, and nutrition are to be downloaded from these sites. Data from different will have different formats, frequencies, depths, and units. These data will need to be transformed into one easily manipulatable format [preferably Excel] so that the data can be used in analysis.

While preparing data, we also need to prepare a bibliography of related literature, which will allow to understand an overall idea on what has been done in examining the food and nutrition and security of Bangladesh in relation to agricultural and food production. This will also allow us to examine literature on policy formulation, implementation, and evaluations.

The student will download data from different websites, prepare then for analysis and conduct simple statistical analyses. Possible time commitment from the student are (hours):

Data gathering – 15 hours

Data manipulation [synchronizing] – 15

Literature search – 10

Preparing an annotated bibliography – 20

Computing simple statistics and graphs – 20

Qualifications of Student Research Assistant – preferably an advanced senior student in Economics or Statistics with sufficient understanding of (1) data downloading from internet sites, (2) data conversion, manipulation, and processing in Excel, (3) development of graphs, tables and other visual tools for incorporating into scientific reports, and (4) simple statistical analysis.

The student will be working under the direct supervision of Dr. Shahidul Islam.