Abstract
This section gives a brief overview of the historic development of the leather industry in Bangladesh, describes its internal organisation and delineates the institutional framework it is embedded within. Bangladesh’s export-oriented leather processing subsector originates from the East Bengal and East Pakistan periods. After Bangladesh’s independence in 1971, the tanning industry underwent a restructuring process accompanied by public policies that paved the way for more value addition. Thanks to these policies being inadequately implemented, the tanneries in Hazaribagh, Dhaka keep operating under conditions beyond their capacity and sustainability, while growth of the leather goods and footwear subsectors has been picking up in recent years. Institutions and organisations related to the leather sector were devised to pursue an outward-oriented strategy but failed to boost export earnings. As a result of the deficient institutional framework, both subsectors leather processing and manufacturing suffer from underfunding and require a high level of investment.
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Notes
- 1.
Chittagong is Bangladesh’s second largest city and hosts the primary national sea port.
- 2.
A detailed description of the production process of leather and the common tanning agents will be provided in Sect. 5.2.1.
- 3.
If there were in fact “around 200 tanneries” as suggested by BFLLFEA (2014), only roughly half of them would have registered with the association. This would point to a relatively low integration into the tanning industry.
References
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Strasser, J. (2015). The Leather Industry in Bangladesh. In: Bangladesh's Leather Industry. Springer Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22548-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22548-7_4
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