"Crisis in Governance": How Independent Is The Independent Review?

Bangladesh is not a country where one finds scores of organizations producing economic reviews or predictions for public information. Only mentionables are perhaps the World Bank's annual, semi-annual and occasional economic updates (from the donor's side) and the budget speech ritual of the finance minister and The Bangladesh Economic Review, an annual publication of the Ministry of Finance (from the government side).1 There are demand-side constraints as well- most people here are skeptic about the authors and sponsors of such reviews. One reason for this state of affairs is crystal clear - ordinary people know that no matter whether the reviews are cooked by jargon-spewing, figure-mongering and lavishly-paid donor agency apostles or select groups of zealots from the cloistered corridors of state power, they are almost never immune from misplaced passions and outrageous claims. Often the over-arching goal of presenting self-seeking versions of pre-conceived notions of facts becomes so paramount that methodological rigor, professional objectivity and intellectual integrity are the first to succumb to the pressure of the kind of review that it o