A Study on the Export Potential of Bangladesh’s Ready-Made Garments

This article explores the international trade flow of Bangladesh’s ready-made garments (RMG). We first suggest the brief history and an international structure of trade among countries by using the trade volume. Then we implemented a gravity model regression with the sample of 38 major partner countries in order to investigate the potential export market for the RMG industry. The fixed effect and random effect model for the panel data during the period of 1990 to 2011 are estimated. Our result shows that Bangladesh’s RMG exports are affected positively by the size of economy, inflation, exchange rate, foreign direct investment(FDI) and trade openness. On the other hand, the distance between trading partners are related negatively with the trade volume. We used the estimated coefficients from the panel regression in order to predict RMG export potential of Bangladesh. This might show which country is the promising export market for Bangladesh RMG industry. We found that Bangladesh has the highest potential of RMG export with Japan and USA, which seem to have considerable room for export growth if trade barriers and constraints are removed. We added some policy implications for encouraging the RMG export of Bangladesh by using the results from the analysis.