South Asia’s Regional Trade Puzzle: The SAARC Promise and The Path Forward
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In this Good to Great Podcast episode, hosts Masrur Rahman and Samanata Thapa from Nepal sit down with Md. Shamsul Haque, former Director General of the SAARC Wing and Additional Foreign Secretary at Bangladesh's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, now CEO of CodersTrust Bangladesh, to ask why a region of nearly two billion people, one of the youngest workforces on the planet, and a manufacturing base of enormous scale still trades more with countries thousands of miles away than with its own neighbors. With deep institutional knowledge of SAARC's inner workings and a front-row seat to the decisions that shaped the bloc's trajectory, Mr. Haque brings a perspective that is both rare and remarkably candid. What follows is not nostalgia, but a rigorous diagnostic of what went wrong and a practical blueprint for what could still go right.
Tune in to hear about:
Why a region representing 21 percent of the world's population trades only five percent internally, leaving $44 billion in potential unrealized
The unanimity trap and institutional paralysis: why SAARC's consensus requirement and decade-long summit freeze have stopped progress in its tracks
How SAFTA's sensitive lists and missing infrastructure have made trade between neighbors more expensive than shipping to the other side of the world
Why informal diplomacy and workforce development could restart dialogue and position South Asia as a digital labor powerhouse
Three agreements for the next decade that could inject fresh blood into a stalled region of two billion people