The Amazon Economy Under Attack: Why the Critics Are Wrong on India, Wrong on China, and Wrong On Bangladesh

15 November 2025

The latest “cold-eyed” critique of Bangladesh’s Amazon Economy blueprint tries to do three

things at once:

1. Shrink India’s digital export success into a cautionary tale because India has a trade

deficit with China. 

2. Pretend Amazon is structurally built only for Chinese factories, so

everyone else is just collateral damage. 

3. Use toy arithmetic to declare Bangladesh’s targets

for exporters and jobs “fantasy”.

Let’s take that apart properly.

1. India Is Our Benchmark, Not Our Punchline

The critic’s favourite move is:

“India’s programme has been running for nine years in an economy ten times larger. It has maybe

150,000 exporters. So how can Bangladesh dream of 300,000?”

Three problems.

(a) They’re lowballing India

Amazon’s own latest numbers say something else:

- Indian sellers have already crossed $20 billion in cumulative e-commerce exports through

Amazon’s Global Selling programme since 2015. - Amazon now publicly targets $80 billion by

2030. - That export base is built on roughly 200,000 Indian exporters, many from smaller cities

like Panipat and Karur.

That’s not a rounding error. That is a serious SME and artisan export engine that simply did

not exist twenty years ago.

So when someone keeps repeating “150,000 in nine years” as if that’s some embarrassing failure,

they’re behind on both facts and reality.

(b) “Economy ten times bigger” is a total GDP trick

Yes, India’s total GDP is about ten times Bangladesh’s. Fine.

But exporters and entrepreneurs don’t grow in proportion to total GDP, they grow in an

environment defined by:

- policy, - infrastructure, - market access, and - income per person.

On that last metric, the “India is huge, Bangladesh is tiny” story collapses.

IMF data for 2024–2025 puts GDP per capita in current dollars roughly at:

- India: about $2,700–2,800 per person, - Bangladesh: about $2,600–2,700 per person.

In other words: at the level of the average citizen, we’re basically in the same income band.

Our economy is smaller because we have fewer people, not because each Bangladeshi is one-tenth

of an Indian.

So when a critic says:“India is ten times bigger, so Bangladesh can only have one-tenth the exporters,”

they’re quietly swapping total size for per-person capacity and hoping nobody notices.

(c) India’s deficit with China doesn’t erase its export win

Then comes the sleight of hand:

“India runs a big trade deficit with China, so this whole Amazon/export story is overrated.”

That’s like saying:

“The kid who tops maths doesn’t count because he eats too much biryani.”

A country can absolutely have: - a serious dependency on Chinese imports and - a powerful,

growing class of SME exporters using digital rails.

India is exactly that. The lesson for Bangladesh is not “stay away”, it’s: 

“Copy India’s export rails, and be smarter than India on import guardrails.”

India had to learn the hard way; we don’t. They paid in lost years, broken Moradabads, and

kirana shops turned into delivery boys. Bangladesh enters later, with almost the same GDP per

person and the benefit of hindsight. We get the latecomer advantage: copy what India got right

for exporters, fix what it got wrong on imports, and move faster.

We compare ourselves to India because it has already built a functioning model in many

categories. We’re not too proud to say it:

India is a model we want to emulate – and improve on – not a failure we pretend to be wiser

than.

2. Amazon Is Not a China-Only Game – Ask the UK, EU, Vietnam, Brazil

Next comes the fatalistic line:

“Amazon is structurally built for Chinese factories; everyone else is background noise.”

Reality doesn’t agree.

- In the UK, over 85,000 SMEs sell on Amazon; more than half of them already export, generating

over £3 billion in export sales in 2021 alone. - Across the EU, around 127,000 EU SMEs selling

on Amazon generated more than €15 billion in export sales in 2024, with over 100,000 reaching

international customers. - In Vietnam, Amazon Global Selling is working with the government and

industry to position Vietnam as Southeast Asia’s e-commerce export hub by 2026, pushing

categories like home, kitchen, apparel, health & personal care and beauty – exactly the sort of

categories we care about. None of those countries are China. Yet all of them are using Amazon-style rails to empower their own SMEs.

So no, Amazon is not genetically programmed just for Shenzhen. The platform is neutral. China

moved first and harder; others are catching up.

Bangladesh’s choice is brutally simple:

Do we use these rails to lift our artisans and SMEs – or do we sit at home whining that Chinese trains got on the tracks first?

3. The “Cold Eye of Arithmetic” Is Wearing Blinders

Now, the part where the critic puts on a lab coat.

Their logic:

1. Grab a stale low estimate of Indian exporters. 

2. Divide by ten for Bangladesh. 

3. Announce

we can “realistically” have only 15–20,000 exporters, not 300,000. 

4. Then say each exporter is just one self-employed person – so not much effect on unemployment.

Looks rigorous. Falls apart on contact.

Exporters don’t scale by population ratio

Exporters scale with:

- policy – forms, signatures, days in customs; - digital rails – post, logistics, payments; -

cluster strategy – furniture, home textiles, leather, agro-processing, light engineering; -

learning curve – whether you start in India’s 2015 confusion or in its 2025 clarity.

India stumbled through the early years and still ended up with around 200,000 exporters and

$20B+ in cumulative exports via Amazon Global Selling. Bangladesh arrives with:

- similar GDP per person, - a clear view of which categories actually move online, - and a

large, emotionally attached diaspora market that already buys Bangladeshi goods.

If you still lazily say “India ÷ 10 = Bangladesh forever,” you’re not doing economics. You’re

hard-coding us as “one-tenth of India” whatever we do.

Self-employment counts – and in Bangladesh, it multiplies

Now the really silly bit:

“One person selling online doesn’t reduce unemployment; it’s survivorship bias.”

So a previously unemployed graduate who now runs a micro-brand, earns revenue and pays herself

doesn’t count as “employed”? Come on.

Every serious labour-force survey counts self-employed and own-account workers as employed when

they’re earning income. You may hate informality; you don’t get to pretend it’s invisible.

And in Bangladesh we’re not guessing. We have a rough picture of how micro and small

enterprises behave:

- There are an estimated 7.8–7.9 million SMEs (broadly defined) in Bangladesh. - They provide jobs to roughly 24–25 million people, or about a third of the workforce.

Even before you look at sector breakdowns, that alone tells you:

A “typical” small or micro enterprise supports multiple people beyond the owner – often a

handful in services, and many more in workshops and manufacturing. In manufacturing SMEs, averages jump far higher – some studies show dozens of workers per enterprise. This is why practitioners in the field often use a simple rule of thumb: A viable micro/small enterprise in Bangladesh usually sustains the owner plus roughly 6–8 others – cutters, tailors, carpenters, polishers, packers, delivery help, basic admin.

So when we say “micro-seller”, we are almost never talking about a lone keyboard warrior. We’re

talking about a team-unit in disguise.

Now run the critic’s beloved arithmetic properly:

- Assume we don’t hit 300,000 exporters. - Take a cautious target: 100,000 serious micro and

small exporters across Amazon, Etsy, eBay, Wayfair, Shopify and regional platforms in 5 years.

- Each supports the owner + ~7 others tied to that export activity.

That’s:

- 100,000 owners - + 700,000 workers and helpers - ≈ 800,000 people whose employment hangs off

that export pipeline.

Before counting:

- logistics workers, - training and support staff, - IT, content and marketing people feeding

into those exporters.

Once you add those, you are very comfortably in the 1–1.5 million job impact range. In that light, a headline of “up to 1.5 million jobs” is not fantasy. It is the upper band of a plausible scenario based on how Bangladeshi micro-enterprises actually employ people.

The “cold eye of arithmetic” only works if you:

- downplay India’s exporter numbers, - ignore that our GDP per person is in the same bracket as

India’s, - ignore our own SME employment structure, - and redefine “employment” so that self-

employed Bangladeshis simply don’t exist.

That’s not cold analysis. That’s a rigged game.

4. China’s Moat Is Real – That’s Exactly Why You Need Policy, Not Paralysis

The critic is right about one big thing: Chinese sellers dominate Amazon in many categories.

They enjoy:

- scale, - ruthless pricing, - and a head start in gaming reviews and search rankings.

Where the argument crashes is the conclusion:

“Because China is strong, Bangladesh shouldn’t even try.” Meanwhile, the US and EU are actively pushing for “China-plus-one” diversification – tariffs,

security reviews, pressure on China-linked supply chains. Buyers are looking for alternative

sourcing bases, which is exactly why Amazon is now spotlighting places like Vietnam as a future

export hub. Vietnam saw that and leaned in. We’re supposed to see it and run away?Bangladesh’s answer cannot be: “We’re too scared of China to step onto the field.”

Our answer has to be:

- We will not compete with China on $2 junk. - We will push where we have edge plus story: -

furniture & décor, - home textiles & jute/natural fibres, - modest fashion, - curated

leather where we meet compliance, - niche foods via compliant cluster-level packhouses. - We

will build cluster-level capability so Savar, Narayanganj, Chattogram, Jessore act as

ecosystems, not random workshops.

On the import side, the blueprint is explicit:

The digital export highway is for our goods going out, not for turning every Bangladeshi shop

into a low-margin last-mile node for other people’s factories.

That means:

- Fast, trust-based lanes for small outbound exports. - A separate, tax-and-risk-aware regime

for low-value inbound B2C imports.

If we screw that up and let Temu/AliExpress/Amazon flood the market duty-light, that’s not

Amazon’s algorithm. That’s our policy failure.

5. The “Before Picture” Everyone Conveniently Forgets

Critics talk as if artisans are living in some pre-digital paradise that Amazon is about to

destroy.

Let’s be honest about the before picture:

- The Moradabad brass worker, the Kashmiri craftswoman, the Bangladeshi weaver – all were

already trapped by exporters and wholesalers who took most of the value. - The artisan’s name

was never on the box, never on the invoice, never on the buyer list. - They had zero data on

who was buying, where, and at what price.

Digital platforms didn’t invent exploitation. They rearranged it – and, crucially, opened a

door that simply did not exist before:

- the chance for an artisan or SME to have their own listing, - their own brand, - and a direct

feedback loop with buyers, if policy and support help them.

The Bangladesh Amazon Economy is about walking our artisans and SMEs through that door with

protection, not leaving them stuck under middlemen and calling that “protection”.

For Bangladeshi artisans, the main enemy was never “Amazon”. It was the middleman who bought at

30 and sold at 100. Our job is to break that chokehold.

6. The Real Choice

Strip away the jargon, and the critic’s message is basically:

- India’s Amazon story doesn’t count because China exists. - Non-China success stories (UK, EU,

Vietnam, Brazil) don’t count because China exists. - Bangladesh must always think of itself as

one-tenth of India, even when our GDP per person is nearly the same. - Self-employment doesn’t

count, micro-enterprises don’t count, SME multipliers don’t count.

Your blueprint argues the opposite:- India is a proof of concept, not a cautionary failure. - Amazon-style rails have already

helped SMEs thrive in the UK, EU, Vietnam, Brazil and beyond. - Bangladesh – with similar GDP

per person – has every right to set ambitious but grounded targets: 100k, 200k, maybe 300k

exporters over time; 1–1.5 million ecosystem jobs using our own SME employment logic. - Our

artisans don’t need nostalgia. They need power over price, brand, and market access.

So yes, let’s use the cold eye of arithmetic:

- On one side: India’s 200,000+ exporters and $20B+ in digital exports, UK/EU/Vietnam/Brazil

SMEs climbing the same ladder. - On the other: Bangladesh still stuck in paper forms, week-long

customs queues and export payments that move like molasses.

The real debate is not whether the final number is 1.2 or 1.5 million.

The real question is:

Do we design a Bangladeshi Amazon Economy that protects our market, exploits our latecomer

advantage, and pushes our artisans and SMEs outward – or do we sit in China’s shadow, call it

“realism”, and stay stuck?

Because in the end, the only true fantasy is believing Bangladesh can survive the 21st century

by refusing to step onto the digital field at all.