Data_Extraction_Workbook_Final - Public (Including ICC)

Bangladesh published one of South Asia’s earliest national AI strategies in 2020, yet by 2025 ranks behind India and only marginally ahead of Pakistan and Sri Lanka — both considerably later adopters — on the Government AI Readiness Index. This paper asks why. Combining a six-year trajectory analysis across six South Asian countries, a formalised policy-document crosswalk (the Institutional Continuity Crosswalk, or ICC), a panel regression, and triangulation against the UN E-Government Development Index, we find Bangladesh’s readiness gains are real but concentrated in domains the state controls directly — public service delivery — and largely absent where readiness depends on coordinated private-sector action, such as industrial and financial AI diffusion. The ICC traces this split to Bangladesh’s own policy record: priorities aimed at government operations were sustained across two strategy documents six years apart, while private-sector-facing priorities were dropped or diffused into vaguer commitments. A parallel crosswalk of India’s 2018–2024 strategy revision shows the opposite pattern — broad continuity with nothing dropped — corresponding to a more evenly strong readiness profile. Theoretically, the paper extends Bromley and Powell’s (2012) distinction between policy-practice and means-ends decoupling by locating decoupling within a single strategy rather than treating it as a property of the strategy as a whole, and proposes its locus is conditioned by state capacity and directness of state control. Methodologically, the ICC is offered as a replicable protocol for tracing policy-priority continuity against measured outcomes, applicable beyond this case. The panel regression finds a positive but statistically insignificant association between strategy adoption and readiness gains, reported descriptively rather than causally given the small comparator sample.