A scoring framework for how countries actually treat Bangladesh—measured on conduct,
not communiqués. Weighted 80% to the present, 20% to history.
The axis it cares about is simple: does the relationship run on
pity or
empowerment?
The purpose isn't grievance—it's a map. Every score comes with the specific
moves that would raise it, because the point of measuring a relationship
is to strengthen it.
Provenance & reliability
This index was constructed by Claude (Anthropic's AI model)
at the publisher's request—not by the publisher—drawing on public data and reporting and applying
the scoring rubric as objectively as the format allows. The dollar figures are sourced (§08);
the dimension scores are structured judgments, and judgments can be wrong. Assumptions are stated
explicitly below, weights and windows are adjustable throughout, and corrections are welcome—the
instrument is built to be argued with, not deferred to.
Pity —
Treating Bangladesh as a problem to be managed. Charity in place of investment, beneficiaries
in place of partners, the basket-case story in place of the balance sheet. Pity is not the
same as unkindness—it is often generous, well-funded, and sincerely meant. That is precisely
what makes it hard to see: a large aid budget delivered with no equity, no seat at the
table, and no expectation that Bangladesh will decide anything is a pity relationship, however
kind its intentions.
Empowerment +
Treating Bangladesh as a counterpart with agency. Capital put at risk beside Bangladeshi
capital, contracts negotiated rather than granted, workers with portable rights, a passport
assessed by the person holding it. Empowerment is not the same as generosity—a hard-nosed
investor who takes equity and expects returns scores higher than a donor who gives freely and
decides everything. The test is standing, not warmth: does the relationship treat
Bangladesh as an agent, or an object?
01
The ranking
Thirty countries with material footprints in Bangladesh, scored −10 to +10 across seven
weighted dimensions. These are provisional editorial scores—every number is an argument.
Open a country, read the case, move the sliders where you disagree. The ranking reshuffles live.
The point is the gap, not the grade: each country's entry pairs the assessment with the
concrete moves that would raise its score. One caveat applies throughout: some of what reads
as neglect by a counterpart reflects absence on Bangladesh's side—see the mirror clause in
the scoring discipline below. Four entries (Japan, Saudi Arabia, World Bank, IMF) now carry a
verified Track record panel with sourced programs and events—a pilot of the evidence
layer being extended to the rest.
Development agencies are not scored alongside countries—they have no visa policy, no labor
market, no trade posture. They carry their own five-dimension rubric, because the hangover
doesn't primarily live in embassies; it lives here. Bilateral agencies (JICA, KOICA, USAID,
FCDO, GIZ, and the DFIs) appear in both lists by design: their conduct informs their
country's score as sovereign behavior, while this board assesses the institution itself—the
instrument, the delivery, the overhead. Normative institutions (ILO, IOM, UNHCR, UNICEF, WFP)
bring conventions, coordination, and programming rather than capital; for them, Capital
Instrument reads as what kind of instrument they bring at all—and for a standards body,
bringing none is the design, not a failing. Oxfam joins as the board's first INGO—frontline
humanitarian delivery judged on the same terms, its overhead layer and fundraising narrative
included. Delivery & Efficacy is weighted heaviest (30%),
since delivery is an agency's entire justification for existing, and one dimension countries
don't need is added: Overhead & Extraction, or who the money actually pays. Same standing
ladder, same temporal split.
The number is shorthand for something more specific: the standing a country grants
Bangladesh in the relationship. Five bands, from being acted upon to being dealt with as an equal.
−10 · PITY0EMPOWERMENT · +10
Why the extremes are empty
No present-day composite reaches either end of the scale—the worst country sits near −2.5, the
worst agency at −5, the best relationship at +4.4—and this is a finding, not a flaw. Individual
dimensions do use the full range (Gulf labor scores of −7 to −8; a −10 for the conduct of 1971),
but a composite is an average across seven dimensions and two eras, and no real relationship is
uniformly extreme. The deep-negative Subject band is where history lives; that no current
relationship reaches it means Bangladesh has exited that standing with every counterpart. The
symmetry holds at the top: no relationship yet reaches Peer. Both extreme bands sitting empty is
the index's summary in one image—the colonial era is over everywhere, and equality has arrived
nowhere.
03
Past vs. present
History counts—colonial extraction, 1971, the structural-adjustment era—but it doesn't get
to do all the work. A country is scored mostly on what it does now. Drag the split and watch
the ranking reshuffle: the UK's number moves for reasons that are two centuries old.
Present · choose the window
The default. Long enough to score the median experience rather than a news cycle;
short enough that a country can change its number within one political generation.
History · everything before
Episodes weigh by how structural they were, not how recent: colonial extraction, 1971,
the structural-adjustment era. The question is what a country did when it had the most
leverage over Bangladesh's trajectory.
80% present · 20% history
04
Seven dimensions of treatment
Each dimension has scoring anchors and an evidence base. The defaults are deliberate:
Capital Posture and Delivery & Efficacy carry half the score between them, 25% each—what
a country puts at risk, and what its engagement actually builds. Everything else is
commentary on those two. Weights are adjustable and renormalize automatically; open a
dimension to see its rubric.
05
Scoring discipline
06
The four postures
The ranking isn't the point—the quadrant is. Engagement volume is derived from dollars, but
from the counterpart's dollars—two-way trade, bilateral aid, and FDI, log-scaled.
Remittances are deliberately discounted to a quarter-weight: they are Bangladeshi workers' own
earnings sent home, a sign that a labour corridor exists, not a measure of the counterpart
engaging Bangladesh. Counting them at face value made Gulf extraction corridors look generous;
correcting it moves Saudi Arabia and the UAE left, toward the volume their own capital justifies.
Plot empowerment against that and the interesting cases fall out immediately: the countries that
move the most and respect the least.
Data notes
Dollar figures are indicative, FY2024–25 / CY2025, rounded—drawn from Bangladesh Bank,
the Export Promotion Bureau, and OECD DAC reporting. Two caveats apply: US remittance figures are inflated by aggregator routing (money sent from
the Gulf through Mastercard and Western Union rails gets booked as American; Bangladesh
Bank's corrections push Saudi Arabia back to #1). And "bilateral aid & concessional"
in the country index deliberately excludes multilateral flows (World Bank, ADB, IsDB)—those
institutions are scored separately in the Agency Annex, so countries can't launder their
posture through them and agencies can't hide behind their shareholders.
07
Peer benchmark: five peer economies
A second-order test of the whole index: do these counterparts treat Bangladesh differently,
or is this simply how they treat the tier? The same composite scale is applied to how twelve
key counterparts—eight countries, four agencies—engage five peer economies—Pakistan as the shared-history control, Indonesia as the proven-leverage
case, Vietnam as the upside trajectory, the Philippines as the labor-institutions benchmark, and
Sri Lanka as the cautionary case: what the same counterparts' conduct looks like when a South
Asian debtor stumbles. Peer figures are
coarser than the Bangladesh scores: composite-level estimates by Claude, pinned to the default
settings (80/20, 10-year window), not full seven-dimension scoring. Read them as direction
and magnitude, not decimals.
BangladeshPK / ID / VN / PH / LK
What the benchmark shows
Bangladesh trails its peer tier with nearly every counterpart—an average gap of roughly one
point—but the gap is not evenly distributed, and its structure is informative.
The largest deficits are with the Gulf states and the World Bank (−1.5 to −2.2),
where Indonesia's example is the most instructive: its 2011 deployment moratorium forced
materially better worker terms from Riyadh, demonstrating that labor-supply leverage exists
and is usable—and the Philippines shows what institutionalizing that leverage looks like:
a dedicated migrant-workers ministry, standardized contracts, and deployment bans wielded as
routine policy (most recently against Riyadh in 2021 over unpaid wages), the closest thing
to an off-the-shelf blueprint for Bangladesh's Gulf deficit. East Asian capital treats Bangladesh at near tier-parity in conduct but
at a fraction of Vietnam's volume—Japan and the IFC score Bangladesh within a tenth of a
point of the peer average, while Korea's Vietnam relationship (Samsung-scale manufacturing
FDI) marks the ceiling Bangladesh has not approached. Vietnam's trajectory is the
central comparator: its 2023 upgrade to a US comprehensive strategic partnership shows
recategorization from aid recipient to strategic economy is achievable within a decade.
Sri Lanka supplies the caution that completes the picture: China's conduct there—Hambantota's
99-year lease, delay and hardball in debt restructuring—is the stress test of the no-lecture,
no-pity model Bangladesh currently scores favorably, and the reason debt discipline belongs in
any strategy built on it; notably, Bangladesh sat on the creditor side of that crisis, extending
Colombo a $200M currency swap in 2021—standing, demonstrated. And the UNDP row is the control: its scores collapse identically across all four
countries—evidence that where the index finds a workshop economy, the model, not the
country, is the variable. The overall conclusion is constructive: roughly half the
Bangladesh gap reads as tier-level treatment that will shift only as the tier shifts, and
half as Bangladesh-specific—negotiable, and in the peers' cases, already negotiated.
08
Sources & notes
v0.4 — de-biasing pass
Three structural corrections to reduce the tool's own bias, prompted by the sharpest critiques it faced.
Engagement volume no longer counts remittances at face value—they are Bangladeshi
workers' repatriated earnings, not a counterpart engaging Bangladesh, so counting them fully made Gulf
extraction corridors look generous. They now enter at a quarter-weight, with FDI added; Saudi Arabia and the
UAE move left on the quadrant, toward the volume their own capital justifies.
The mirror clause is now structural—applied to every negative score, asking how much reflects the
counterpart's contempt versus Bangladesh's own absence, so the index can't be read as selectively nationalist.
And a new rule states plainly what the index does not score: conduct toward Bangladesh, not
regime type or strategic wisdom—so China and Russia ranking well is a measurement, not an endorsement.
v0.3 — sourcing & delivery audit
Every one of the 51 scored players—30 countries and 21 agencies—now carries a
verified Track record: sourced programs, deals, and events behind the score,
each tagged to the dimension it moves and linked to its source. Expand any row to see it. Verification moved
nine scores from the v0.2 editorial draft:
US DFC +0.5 → −1.1 (not authorized to operate in Bangladesh) ·
Denmark +0.1 → +0.7 (the $550M APM Terminals port deal closed) ·
US +1.0 → +1.2 (Feb 2026 trade deal cut tariffs to 19%) ·
Russia +1.0 → +0.8 (Rooppur delays) ·
UK −0.1 → −0.2 (2025 student-visa crackdown) ·
Netherlands −1.2 → −1.0 and Germany −1.2 → −1.1 ·
Oman and UAE mobility eased (partial reopenings).
Three players were added this pass—IMF, and the board's first INGO,
Oxfam, alongside the normative UN bodies. Everything else held under verification,
including the most contested scores (Pakistan, India, China, Saudi Arabia).
A later pass also tightened the Delivery & Efficacy discipline into a
graduated ladder—operating assets earn full credit, signed-but-unbuilt earns almost none—after an audit found
announcements over-credited as achievements. Six efficacy scores eased: China +5→+2
(Teesta and its package remain MOUs), Denmark, Russia,
ADB, AIIB, and IFC
(bKash keeps its credit; the climate-platform lead doesn't).
Primary data sources
Remittance corridor figures: Bangladesh Bank wage-earners' remittance statistics (FY2024–25) and IOM
Displacement Tracking Matrix, Remittance Inflows to Bangladesh 2024–2025 Snapshot. Trade figures:
Export Promotion Bureau of Bangladesh, Bangladesh Bank, UN Comtrade / World Bank WITS. FDI stock: Bangladesh
Bank Foreign Direct Investment surveys; UNCTAD World Investment Report. Bilateral aid and concessional
lending: OECD DAC Creditor Reporting System; agency annual reports (JICA, EDCF, AFD, Sida). Labor and
recruitment-cost references: World Bank–KNOMAD migration cost surveys; ILO complaint and reform documentation;
BMET overseas employment statistics. Mobility context: national visa statistics and Henley & Partners
passport-access data.
The index rests on stated analytical choices, none of which are empirical constants.
Weights: the defaults (Capital Posture 25%, Delivery & Efficacy 25%, Mobility 13%,
Trade 13%, Labor 11%, Voice 9%, Narrative 4%) privilege capital and delivery deliberately; a labor-first or
mobility-first weighting produces a materially different ranking, which is why the weights are adjustable.
Time: the 80/20 present/history split and both window definitions (2016–2026 and
2020–2026) are assumptions; the post-COVID window's score overrides are second-order judgments layered on
first-order ones. Engagement volume: defined as the counterpart's own committed dollars—two-way trade + bilateral
aid + FDI (annual flows, log-scaled). Remittances are counted at a quarter-weight, not face value: they are
Bangladeshi earnings repatriated by Bangladeshi workers, so treating them as a counterpart's "engagement"
flatters extraction corridors—counting them fully once put Saudi Arabia and the UAE near the top of the axis
on the strength of Bangladesh's own labour. FDI stock is displayed; FDI flow enters the volume calculation. Scope:
multilateral flows are excluded from country scores and scored in the Agency Annex instead; bilateral agencies
appear in both places by design. Scoring: anchors reward the median experience over
exceptions and observable conduct over statements; where evidence was mixed (Qatar's reforms, Italy's corridor,
USAID's split record), the score reflects a balance Claude judged, not a fact Claude found.
Peer benchmark: the Pakistan/Indonesia/Vietnam/Philippines/Sri Lanka comparisons in §07 are composite-level
estimates pinned to default settings, not full dimension-by-dimension scoring—an order coarser than the
Bangladesh scores they sit beside. Data: figures are rounded, fiscal and calendar years are mixed where noted, US remittance
data is inflated by aggregator routing, and the underlying knowledge is current to early 2026.
Editorial note
All dimension scores—present and historical, for countries and agencies alike—are provisional assessments
produced by Claude (v0.4). As of this version, every scored player carries a Track record of
web-verified, individually sourced programs and events behind its score; the numerical weights layered on
those facts remain editorial judgments. They aim for objectivity within a subjective format; there is room
for error in both the underlying facts and the judgments layered on them. Dollar figures are indicative and rounded; fiscal-year and calendar-year sources are mixed where noted.
Events referenced in the assessments (order cancellations in 2020, visa suspensions, labor-reform timelines,
project delivery records, court outcomes) are matters of public record reported by the outlets above and
others, but readers should verify any individual figure or score before citing it. Corrections and challenges
are the intended use of the adjustable weights, windows, and sliders throughout.