Sustainable Industrialization in Bangladesh: A Case Study of the Ready-Made Garments and the Leather Industries

Abstract

The world has already witnessed by the massive growth and this boom of economy brought detrimental changes in environmental quality. Due unplanned industrial development, the environment is losing its own balance. There is anxiety about the future of the world. So, to solve this problem the world need to find out some solutions. The world needs a kind of development process which will increase economic growth, but without harming the balance of the environment. Moreover, Sustainable development is a universally agreed development process to address all these challenging issues. Considering these issues the main goal of the study was to find out the prospects of Bangladesh to promote sustainable industrialization by 2030, and to examine the impact of the eco-innovation in the environmental sustainability performance to formulate long term policy for sustainable industrialization program. The nature of the work demands the collection and analysis of both primary and secondary data. Hence, to project how close the Bangladesh to achieve the target of SDG 9.2, this study considers indicator 9.2.1a and 9.2.1b. To forecast the country’s overall progress related with sustainable industrialization this study use ARIMA model and after forecasting the value this paper found that the manufacturing value added as a percentage of GDP will be 21.26 percent and Manufacturing value added per capita (in USD) for the year 2030 will be 354.33 USD in Bangladesh by 2030. This study found that indicator 9.2.1a is still far from achieving the target of manufacturing share of GDP by 2030. However, from the forecasting value of indicator 9.2.1.b this paper can claim that, the forecasted value USD 354.33 is very close to the targeted value USD 360.96. To fulfill the second specific objective, this study collected data from the manufacturing sector (RMG industry and Leather industry). The questionnaire was collected and complied from different important documents from the literature reviewed, but considering the data collection problem (during this Covid-19 pandemic), the study used only total 50 RMG and leather industries for collection of primary data. The collected data from the questionnaire survey was analyzed both by factor analysis to form an index for environmental sustainability performance, eco-innovation and eco-process innovation. The Classical Liner Regression Model was employed to prove the hypotheses. From the descriptive analyses of the study it is found that, eco-innovation concentrated on the reduction of materials use, reduction of energy use, reduction of pollution and replacing of materials with less polluting substitutes. The empirical result of this study has shown the eco- innovation has a positive relationship with environmental sustainability performance in the case of the manufacturing sector and also in the case of RMG sector of the Bangladesh. Specifically, from the empirical results it was found that eco-product innovation has a positive impact on environmental sustainability performance, but the eco-process innovation does not have any positive impact on environmental sustainability performance in the case of overall manufacturing industry and as well as RMG industry. But due to the inappropriateness of the data for factor analysis this study could not able to identify the impact of eco-innovation in the case of the leather sector. Therefore, for the implementation of sustainable industrialization in the manufacturing sector of the Bangladesh, it is necessary to implement various policies and programs covering all these factors.