Mamun Rashid

In order to narrow or meet the investment gap and more so, to abide by employment generation obligations, every country needs foreign direct investment (FDI).

Lately, I have been receiving calls from friends and family asking which banks are safe or if they should withdraw their deposits from a particular bank.

Thanks to our entrepreneurs, a few dynamic policy planners, mostly docile and hard-working workers, Bangladesh’s private sector has expanded rapidly and became a crucial driver of economic growth.

Until mid-2010 I was not aware that the immediate past prime minister had a special assistant for stolen asset recovery.

A new governor has joined the central bank of Bangladesh. As a leading macroeconomist, he has rightly identified inflation and the lack of discipline in the banking sector as the main culprits to be addressed. Both issues are very important, there’s no doubt about it.

We have been talking about banking sector reforms since long as our banking sector is plagued with insider lending, bad loans, low capitalisation and risk coverage, weak governance, sub-optimal automation, a lack of expert manpower and non-availability of better products to serve the emerging clients and cater their shifting demands.

Bangladesh witnessed a threefold rise in human outflow over the past decade. Yet, remittance inflow has experienced relatively poor growth, rising from $15 billion to a maximum of $24 billion.

Decision makers need to be very cautious regarding who they put up to dispassionately clear the mess.

My friend who is an apparel exporter received a call from his Spanish buyer over the weekend.

Backed by experience and good judgement, Gen Z ideas are worthwhile investments.

Free trade agreements (FTA) are made between countries to lower trade barriers through little to zero government tariffs or subsidies and other means.

China is the largest exporting and second-largest importing country in the world. The Chinese domestic market is also expanding fast with increasing consumerism and brand popularity. Yet Bangladesh’s export to China is dropping despite signing the tariff waiver for many “Made in Bangladesh” products.

When I visited Colombo last April, the airport was humming with a lot of tourists. My experience at the immigration was very good while foreign exchange booths were showing a much more stable exchange rate. Afterwards my interactions with a few entrepreneurs revealed a revival of industrial production and exports too.

It was possibly 2008 when my seniors at Citigroup India realised it was becoming hard for global companies to attract IIM (Indian Institute of Management) or IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) graduates as they were building their own startups.

The semiconductor manufacturing sector is well-known for its complexity, high stakes and intense corporate competition. Demand has always been driven by innovation, with every new technology changing the game.

The finance minister on Thursday placed the budget for fiscal year 2024-25, which is 4.6 percent bigger than the ongoing one. The increase is much lower than the average inflation seen in the last few years, reflecting the monetary constraints the government is facing as well as some of the realities of the crisis which commands a certain extent of belt-tightening

Abul Maal Abdul Muhith, the former finance minister of Bangladesh, and more importantly, one of the architects of Bangladesh's economic development, left an undeniable legacy upon his passing, more than two years ago.

Bangladesh’s economy is struggling with higher inflation, depletion of foreign exchange reserves, pressure on the exchange rate, shrinking capital inflows, and pressure on the budget.

Thanks to HSBC Bangladesh, I was privy to a presentation on Asia economic outlook with a special focus on Bangladesh.

This is exactly the question I came across from the investment community in the US, India, and Singapore in the last one month or so. They asked where the exchange rate may settle down and the local currency borrowing rate may go. If they invest in Bangladesh, will they be able to take back their return on investments timely and easily?