Integrated Accounting and Macroeconomic Analysis of Bangladesh's Sacrifice Economy: Market Structure, Financial Flow, and Welfare Effects
Description
This paper develops an integrated accounting and macroeconomic framework to analyse the annual Qurbani (Eid-ul-Adha) sacrifice economy of Bangladesh, focusing on market structure, financial flows, and welfare effects across rural and urban households. The study positions the sacrifice economy not as a one-week consumption spike but as a recurring, religiously embedded macro-event that mobilises capital, labour, and redistributive transfers at a scale comparable to medium-sized industrial subsectors. Method — A sequential mixed-methods design was employed. Phase one combined a systematic literature review (PRISMA, n = 51 included studies) with secondary macro data (Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, Bangladesh Bank, Export Promotion Bureau, 2015–2025). Phase two collected primary data through a stratified household survey across the eight administrative divisions of Bangladesh (n = 620) and twenty key informant interviews with farmers, traders, religious leaders, tannery owners and policy officers. Quantitative analysis used descriptive statistics, ordinary least squares regression, and a partial least squares structural equation model (PLS-SEM) estimated in SmartPLS 4 with bootstrapping (5,000 resamples). Qualitative data were thematically coded in NVivo 14. Findings — The sacrifice economy is estimated to contribute approximately 1.05 percent of national GDP in 2025, with annual transactional throughput exceeding BDT 205 billion in retail and 235 billion in mobile-financial-services payments during the Eid week. PLS-SEM results show that financial-flow integration (β = 0.45, p < 0.001) and market efficiency (β = 0.32, p < 0.001) jointly explain 41 percent of variance in household welfare outcomes. Cattle import dependency has collapsed from an indexed value of 100 in 2015 to 4 in 2025, indicating near-complete domestic self-sufficiency, while rawhide prices have failed to recover to pre-2019 levels, signalling a structural value-chain failure. Implications — Findings support a policy agenda combining (i) formalisation of cattle haats through digital invoicing and traceability, (ii) targeted credit lines for smallholder fatteners, (iii) reform of the rawhide collection cartel through cooperative auction platforms, and (iv) Shariah-compliant micro-insurance for sacrificial animals. The proposed framework can be extended to other Muslim-majority economies and offers a template for embedding religious-cyclical events into national accounting practice. Keywords: sacrifice economy; Qurbani; Bangladesh; market structure; financial flows; household welfare; Islamic economics; structural equation modelling