Meet the future star economists of Bangladesh

Before Hasibul Hasan Emon went to Nepal to participate in the 18th South Asian Economics Students' Meet (SAESM), he had very little expectation to win. Simply getting to participate in this prestigious meet was enough for Emon. But little did he know that his paper would win the 'Sen-Haq' Award for best of the best research paper from around 60 papers presented in the competition. 

"I was awestruck when they announced my name. It took quite some time to process what was happening. As I went on to the stage to receive the award, I heard my friends chanting Bangladesh… Bangladesh... But it still felt too unreal to be true," said Emon.

Even better, he was the first Bangladeshi to ever win it. He was also a finalist in the 'Budding Economist' competition, which involves a series of tests to determine the best undergrad Economics student in South Asia. 

"Given I was not the topper or even the best student among my peers, it was even more unreal when I got called up on stage for the final interview of the Budding Economist competition," he added.

South Asian Economics Students' Meet (SAESM) is a conference as well as a competition among Economics students from all across South Asia. Typically, different versions of the event are hosted by different countries from South Asia and are supported by a host of South Asian think tanks like SANEM (South Asian Network on Economic Modelling), the World Bank, ICIMOD (The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development), Lahore University of Management Sciences etc. 

SAESM is an exciting opportunity for the students of Economics to get in touch with their counterparts from other countries in South Asia. SAESM is also a series of competitions such as research paper competitions, budding economist competitions, economics quizzes, panel discussions etc.  The 18th SAESM was held from 12-15 March in Nepal and organised by Tribhuvan University. Around 60 students from seven South Asian countries (except Maldives) participated in the Meet. 

Usually each participant is asked to prepare and present a research paper on one of the ten themes selected for that particular year. Then, ten best paper awards are given out to the best paper in each theme. Eventually, the best paper out of the ten best papers wins the 'Sen-Haq' Award. 

Unfortunately, the 'Sen-Haq' award had been typically dominated by Indian and Pakistani participants and Bangladesh never won the award before. At least, until now. 

Hasibul Hasan Emon. Photo: Courtesy

Emon's research focused on poverty and vulnerability in rural Bangladesh. He titled his paper "Shocks, Resilience, and the Dynamics of Vulnerability in Rural Bangladesh" and used household-level data from the Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey for his analysis. 

Through his research, Emon discovered that resilience against shocks plays a crucial role in protecting households from food insecurity and poverty, and aids in their recovery from existing vulnerabilities. Additionally, Emon found that an enhanced capacity for resilience can counteract the negative effects of shocks on household welfare. 

To address these issues, Emon's research highlights the need to strengthen household resilience through the expansion of quality education and employment opportunities, better access to basic services, and adequate social security to protect households against unexpected shocks.

Regarding his motivation, Emon said, "During the Covid-19 pandemic, many Bangladeshi families experienced considerable degradation in their standards of living and the prolonged nature of the pandemic left them vulnerable to poverty. I wanted to check whether developing shock resilience could somehow reduce this vulnerability."

Apart from Emon winning the Sen-Haq award, team Bangladesh also won the best paper awards in five out of the ten themes. The four other winners are Farzin Mumtahena, Samiha Islam, Khandakar Iffah and Jinat Jahan Khan on human development, macroeconomics of pandemic and war, international trade, labour market and employment themes, respectively. 

At the time of being selected for the competition, all of them were undergraduate students from the Department of Economics at the University of Dhaka. Now they are pursuing their Master's degree at the university.

While the other papers did not win the Sen-Haq awards, they also made some interesting observations. For instance, Farzin prepared a child-deprivation index and checked whether the deprivation of basic facilities among children affected educational attainment. 

"I found that multidimensionally poor children and children with functional difficulties are significantly less likely to have acquired overall foundational learning skills. Learning disparities between deprived and non-deprived children widen as they grow older, so this calls for early interventions," said Farzin. 

But preparing a full-fledged research paper is always challenging, let alone doing it as  an undergraduate student. Samiha won the best paper on the theme 'Macroeconomics of pandemic and war'. But preparing the paper was quite a challenging experience for her. 

"I had never worked with macroeconomic data before. So when I was selected to write a paper on macroeconomics, I was nervous and I had no idea how to proceed. I had to learn to use new statistical analysis software like EViews," said Samiha. 

Iffah also had a similar experience, albeit for different reasons. Her paper focused on how the quality of governance affects bilateral trade flows in South Asian countries using a gravity model analysis. 

"While it's intuitive to assume that high levels of corruption should adversely affect export volume, that was not my finding for South Asia countries. My hypothesis was true for nearly all developed economies. But in South Asia, I found that corruption had contributed to higher exports. This was perplexing to me and I thought I did something wrong. The submission deadline was closing in and I had gotten the absolute opposite results!" said Iffah. 

Iffah later figured out that corruption had been so endemic to the South Asian economies that corruption, at least in the short run, contributed to higher trade. 

But they also had help. As Samiha said, everyone was extremely helpful when they were preparing for the competition. From their alumni, and friends, to the teachers, everyone helped them out with the silliest issues with the paper.

"I would also like to thank our supervisors, Mahtab Uddin Sir (Assistant Professor, University of Dhaka) and Farhin Islam (Short-term Consultant, the World Bank Group) who always helped us solve any problem we had. Farhin apu even checked all of our papers for formatting issues, grammatical errors and other basic mistakes," said Iffah.

"Our teachers like Bidisha Mam (Professor Dr Sayema Haque Bidisha) always inspired us to do our best and win as many papers as possible for the country. Selim sir (Professor Selim Raihan) also guided us on how to present the paper most effectively," said Farzin.

The SAESM team wants to continue working in academia in the long run and want to come up with more exciting research in the future as well