With frequent climate change related disaster shocks and a huge burden of refugees from neighbor country’s conflict, Bangladesh needs to formulate effective strategies to support its most prospective sectors for ensuring sustainable development. This paper aims at disentangling the process of economic growth in Bangladesh to identify some prospective accelerating sectors, which could achieve constant economic growth with proper policy support. Using a modification of traditional structural decomposition analysis (SDA), we identify some prospective growth sectors in the Bangladesh economy. We have found labor intensive manufacturing and some high value added service sectors as key sectors for growth in Bangladesh. We compare the existing economic structure of Bangladesh with five other Asian lower income developing countries (LIDCs) and found all other countries have mostly similar economic structure, except Vietnam. Our analysis showed Bangladesh is mainly dependent on the textiles and food sectors in manufacturing and construction, real estate and inland transport sectors in service, for its quick growth. Most importantly, we found some new manufacturing sectors, such as basic metal and machineries, NEC, and recycling sectors, are constantly growing over the last decade, using our technique. Proper policy support to these high potential emerging sectors could help Bangladesh achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs) of ensuring economic growth and sustainable development through promoting industrial diversification.

According to the classical theory of economic development, as in Akamatsu’s flying geese model, many countries should exhibit similar development patterns from agriculture-based sectors to processed or labor-intensive industries as a long-run trend. This paper identifies some common development patterns in 6 Asian lower-income developing countries (LIDCs) to confirm Flying Geese model for South and Southeast Asia, using three periods of the input‒output table with a novel decomposition technique derived from a conventional method. Our results show that labor-intensive and light manufacturing sectors, along with some high-value-added service sectors, are the most promising sectors in these countries. Food, basic metal and textiles in manufacturing and construction, electricity and transport in service are commonly growing in most countries. Among our targeted Asian countries, only Vietnam has been developing many diversified sectors in manufacturing from traditional labor-intensive sectors to highly technology-oriented sectors. This means that Vietnam might achieve an advanced stage faster than other Asian countries. In addition, we have found some prospective accelerating sectors in these countries with our novel decomposition technique, such as manufacturing and recycling, basic metal, and rubber. These findings indicate that these countries have started to diversify industries from their traditional sectors, which resembles the flying geese model.