সাতকাহন
Seven trashes collected by the senses. Well, bonus holiday edition of 20 trashes.
Remittances and propaganda
I don’t really have much to say about how the war crimes trial is unfolding. However, I think it’s important to push back against a propaganda being peddled. According to some anti-trial voices (in facebook, Bangla blogs, newspapers, and even some TV talk show stars), the trial has annoyed the Saudis, and remittances are crashing because of that.
The thing is, there is no evidence of that in the data. The chart below shows through the year growth in total remittance and remittance from Saudi Arabia. Do you see the slump in remittance from the kingdom as we approach the trial conclusion?
(Source: CEIC Asia, smoothed by three month moving average).
There may be reasons to worry about the outlook for remittance — there could be a slump in oil prices, or there might be political turmoil in the Gulf. We should be concerned with the human rights situation in the region. But Saudi annoyance over the war crimes trial is causing a remittance slump — that’s nonsense.
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