The Impact of Trade Liberalization on Nutritional Status in Bangladesh

The present study examines the relationship of nutritional status with trade liberalization in the context of Bangladesh using time series data from 1990 to 2010.Average tariff rate is used as the key variable to measure the openness of the economy. Other than key variable of trade liberalization, the study employs four variables namely real GDP, agricultural land, value of imported food and reserve of foreign exchange to assess the availability and accessibility to food that improve the dietary energy intake. Many empirical studies have addressed the consequences of malnutrition with relation to international trade. However, this study pays attention to some new variables to investigate the relationship between nutrition and trade liber-alization in the context of Bangladesh. The empirical result shows that trade openness has positive and significant impact on per capita daily energy supply. The key variables that significantly influence the nutritional status of the coun-try are real GDP and value of imported food. Real GDP shows robust and positive association with nutritional status since with rising GDP people are able to diversify their food consumption to fulfil their nutritional requirement. The study finds the value of imported food is significant and the impact is ac-cording to our expectation.