Tasqurun Nessa
Affiliation: Department of Economics, Asian University of Bangladesh, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Email: [email protected]
Abstract: The Bangladesh economy is dominated by the service sector. According to Bangladesh Economic Review (2008), Bangladesh’s major service sub-sectors contain wholesale and retail, transportation, storage and communications, real estate, rental, commercial and community activities etc. This paper is based on the secondary data. In this paper I have tried to present the trend of contribution to GDP of the service sector in Bangladesh from 1971 to 2020. According to the latest data of Statista 2020, the contribution of agriculture, industry and service sector to the country’s GDP are respectively 13.07%, 28.54% and 52.56% in 2018. But in the 1971-1980 decade there were different situations. That time the contribution of agriculture, industry and service sector to the country’s GDP were respectively 44%, 11% and 45% (Source: World Bank). Although the service sector is the largest contributor to the country’s earnings, agriculture is the largest contributor to Bangladesh’s employment. About 40% of the population work in agriculture, 39% population work in service and about 20% population work in the industry sector. (World Bank, 29 September 2019). In this paper I have also examined the growth rate of the service sector and the contribution of the sub-sector of the service sector to GDP in Bangladesh. The growth rate of the service sector is almost steady from 5.43% in 2000-01 to 6.80 in 2018-19. All the sub sectors of service have increased from 1995-96 to 2017-18 except Real Estate, Renting and Business Activity which have decreased.
Keywords: Bangladesh; Base year of Calculating GDP; GDP; Service sector.