From export promotion to export intelligence

Bangladesh has spent decades asking how much it can export. The more consequential question now is what it should export, where, when, and under what conditions.

Export diversification can no longer rely primarily on lists of “promising sectors” or periodic consultations with business associations.

It requires a systematic capacity to identify future markets, anticipate demand, detect emerging trade barriers, and align Bangladesh’s productive capabilities with global opportunities. Bangladesh needs to shift from export promotion to export intelligence.

The urgency is clear. Its recent export competitiveness for jobs project reports that firms targeted for non-RMG exports substantially increased their exports and created nearly 180,000 jobs.

Importantly, the project also launched a market intelligence platform in May 2025 to connect Bangladeshi producers with export market information and with international buyers.

Yet the existence of a market information platform is not the same as an intelligence-driven trade policy system.

Market information tells an exporter what is happening; intelligence should help policymakers understand why it is happening, what may happen next, and what Bangladesh should do about it.

Global commerce is changing rapidly due to artificial intelligence, supply chain restructuring, environmental requirements, geopolitical uncertainty, and shifting consumer preferences.

Bangladesh, therefore, needs analytical systems that can detect these changes before they become commercial shocks.

Export intelligence should begin with a simple question: Where is future demand likely to emerge? Rather than focusing solely on the current export basket, analysts could integrate international trade statistics, import growth trends, revealed comparative advantage, unit values, tariff rates, non-tariff measures, logistics costs, and competitor performance.

Such an analysis could identify products with growing global demand and reveal products for which Bangladesh already has the productive capabilities but has failed to enter potentially attractive markets.

The second dimension is market intelligence. Not every growing market is necessarily suitable for Bangladesh.

A country may have rapidly rising demand for a particular product but also impose stringent standards, costly certification requirements, or restrictive rules of origin.

Conversely, a smaller market may offer a more accessible entry point.

The Bangladesh Trade Portal already provides regulatory information to improve predictability and transparency for traders.

A logical next step would be to transform this information into analytical intelligence that shows exporters not only the rules but also their commercial implications.

This matters especially in the context of LDC graduation. The consequences of graduation vary by export structure, preference utilization, and market-access conditions.

Bangladesh is particularly exposed because of its concentration in clothing and its historical reliance on preferential market access.

Therefore, a post-graduation trade strategy cannot simply ask which countries buy Bangladeshi products today.

It must ask which markets are likely to remain commercially attractive under changing tariffs, rules of origin, and regulatory requirements.

The third component is predictive analytics. Bangladesh has large volumes of customs, export, production, logistics, and business data, but data becomes strategically valuable only when integrated and analyzed.

Machine-learning models could identify unusual shifts in import demand, forecast product-level market growth, detect declining competitiveness, and pinpoint markets where Bangladeshi firms could replace established suppliers.

Predictive systems could also issue early warnings about falling orders, rising freight costs, regulatory changes, or emerging competitors.

Such a system should not replace human judgment. Rather, it should enhance the quality and timeliness of policy decisions.

Trade officials, industry associations, researchers, and exporters could combine quantitative forecasts with insights into production capacity, buyer relationships, and regulatory realities.

The objective would be a human-led, evidence-based architecture for trade intelligence.

Institutional fragmentation, however, is an obstacle. Export-related information is dispersed across the Export Promotion Bureau (EPB), the Ministry of Commerce, the National Board of Revenue, Bangladesh Bank, the Bangladesh Trade and Tariff Commission, customs authorities, sector associations, and other institutions.

The EPB’s policy functions include preparing market and product concept papers and providing input into export policy decisions.

The challenge is to integrate these functions into a continuous national intelligence process rather than treating intelligence as an occasional report.

The Export Policy 2024-2027 provides an institutional foundation for export promotion and diversification.

But the country needs to move one step further: from identifying priority products to continuously testing their commercial viability.

A national export-intelligence system could maintain dynamic dashboards covering product opportunities, destination markets, competitors, tariffs, standards, logistics, buyer trends, and technological changes.

The private sector must also become a producer of intelligence. Large exporters possess valuable information on buyers, prices, product trends, and emerging requirements.

SMEs, meanwhile, often lack the resources to collect this information independently.

Public-private data partnerships could therefore make market intelligence available to smaller firms while safeguarding commercially sensitive information.

The diversification problem is not simply a shortage of products. It is partly due to a lack of foresight.

The country has repeatedly identified sectors with export potential; the harder task is determining which opportunities are commercially viable, which markets are accessible, which capabilities must be developed, and when to intervene.

The next generation of trade policy should therefore ask not only “What can Bangladesh export?” but also “What will the world want to buy, where will it want to buy it, what will prevent Bangladesh from supplying it, and what must Bangladesh do today to be ready?” Answering these questions requires export intelligence, market intelligence, and predictive analytics to become core tools of trade policy.

In an increasingly data-driven global economy, Bangladesh’s future export advantage may depend not only on what it can produce but also on how early it can spot the next opportunity.

(The writer: Former Additional Secretary to the Government. Currently Associate Professor of Public Policy, Bangladesh Institute of Governance and Management — Affiliated to the University of Dhaka)