Artwork Credit: Debashish Chakrabarty
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Lights Don't Lie.
For the past decade, we were told that Bangladesh's economy was racing ahead. The government spoke of miraculous growth. Newspapers ran headlines—“Bangladesh: 2nd Fastest Growing Economy in South Asia”. I remember reading that one in The Daily Star, nodding quietly like most people did. The speeches, the charts, the slogans—they all said the same thing: we were winning.
But outside the headlines, the picture didn’t match.
While the graphs climbed in PowerPoint slides, poverty etched into every corner. You walk down the street and you’d see children begging for food while slums stretched further. Frequent power cuts became normal again. The middle class—the very people meant to benefit from growth—suffered the most. Everyone talked about development, but no one could point to it.
That’s the thing about dictatorships: when truth becomes inconvenient, fiction takes its place. Say a lie often enough, and it begins to look like a fact. But we live in a time when some things can’t be manipulated. Satellites, for one. From hundreds of kilometers above, they capture something very real—light. And light tells its own story about growth.
One of the most powerful pieces of evidence comes from economist Luis Martinez, who showed that autocratic regimes routinely inflate their GDP by over 35%, when compared to what satellite-recorded night-time lights (NTL) suggest.
After the fall of the Hasina regime, when the press finally had its voice back, those questions came rushing in: Was any of that growth real?
The Daily Star began publishing what had long been whispered: That BBS officials had pre-decided GDP figures, then retrofitted the numbers to match. The technical review bodies were quietly dismantled after 2015. And that former Planning Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal oversaw a small inner circle that systematically manipulated national statistics.
All of this pointed to a grim conclusion: much of the growth we were sold was never there to begin with.But calling out the lie isn’t enough. The real question is: how far from the truth were we? That’s the question I set out to answer.
To estimate the real GDP growth of Bangladesh, I used a technique first developed by some economists in 2011. Their method combines two types of data—official GDP growth and satellite-recorded night-time lights—to create a more accurate estimate of economic activity. I adapted their framework using newer data and country rankings from the World Bank to update how much trust we should place in each source. This allowed me to calculate a corrected version of GDP growth for Bangladesh and other developing countries, especially where official data is unreliable. Night-time lights refer to the brightness visible from space after dark, and economists are increasingly using them as a proxy for GDP growth—especially in places where official statistics are limited or unreliable.
When I compared Bangladesh’s official GDP growth with estimates based on satellite-recorded night-time lights, a clear pattern emerged: growth has been consistently overstated. Even before 2009, official numbers tended to be higher than what the satellite data suggested. But after 2009, the level of overstatement increased sharply and remained high for the next decade.
Between 2010 and 2020, the average reported growth was 161% higher than the satellite-based estimate. In contrast, during the years before 2009, the average overstatement was about 43%. In absolute terms, the gap widened from roughly 1.05 percentage points to 1.86 percentage points per year. So here is what my research found: the true growth of our economy in the following table.
If you are interested in reading my paper you can access it here: Paper
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