Characterization of resource consumption and efficiency trends in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan: Economy-wide biotic and abiotic material flow accounting from 1978 to 2017

This study, conducted as a first try, explores the resource metabolism in three main economies in South Asia (in terms of both scale and growing rate of economy) namely Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, with a standard economy-wide material flow accounting approach using the most updated data from 1978 to 2017. In detail, resource consumption patterns, resource efficiency and productivity, trade related issues, as well as macro-policies affecting regional resource utilization were analyzed in-depth. Results highlighted that, in general, rapid consumption of imported resources, especially construction minerals, fossil fuels, and industrial minerals has emerged. Domestic material consumption per capita increased by 81%, 93% and 46% during 1978–2017 in the three countries, respectively, due to the living standards enhancement, improved urban infrastructure as well as rapid industrial development. With rapidly growing resource consumption, improvements in resource productivity were still low compared with mature economies like Japan and United States. It was 410.7 USD/t for Bangladesh, followed by India (358.7 USD/t) and Pakistan (275.0 USD/t), as of 2017. One critical finding was that resource intensive production (e.g., primary materials, textile and agricultural products etc.) was driving most of the bilateral trade among the three countries, which resulted in lower overall resource productivity. The other critical insight was the future increasing pressure on regional and global resource competition, according to the revealed rising inflow of foreign resources in the studied countries. Finally, the macro-policy analysis highlighted that the impacts of environmental protection and resource efficiency policies were far from enough. And, lower per capita GDP of this region was still a significant impediment for integrated environmental and resources management. Higher focus on resource productivity, from a policy perspective, on agricultural and industrial sectors is highly recommended to forward beneficial implications for the selected countries.