The mismatch has prompted fresh calls among economists for investigations.

The Export Promotion Bureau (EPB) yesterday unveiled the export data for the July-September period of fiscal year 2024-25 and officially acknowledged that there was a $3.16 billion export data mismatch in the same quarter of the previous fiscal year.

Since FY2022, actual export earnings emerging from the banking sector data were significantly lower than the figures reported by the EPB.

The executive director of PRI Bangladesh says at ERF event

The mismatch of export data raises a fundamental question about the precision of economic reporting and its ramifications for Bangladesh's economy.

Accurate data is a crucial input for taking effective policies and putting the economy on the right track. If the data is not correct or time-befitting, policies might be proved wrong. Then, development successes will be only on paper and will not reflect reality.

The government has initiated moves to correct the system to calculate national data in oder to avoid the repetition of the shock after the central bank reported a massive statistical mismatch linked to exports.

One of the main reasons for the $14 billion discrepancy in the export data was the Export Promotion Bureau’s (EPB) double counting of exported garment items made in factories inside export processing zones (EPZs), Salman F Rahman, the prime minister’s adviser on private industry and investment, said yesterday.

The need for correct and regularly updated data cannot be overstated

The Export Promotion Bureau (EPB) is taking more time than it usually does to release the export data for June apparently because of the shock following the central bank’s correction of overseas sales figures.

The central bank discovered six types of statistical wrongdoing that inflated export data, a development that led to a multibillion-dollar correction.

In 2022-23, the mismatch between the actual realisation reported by BB and EPB shipment figure was $12.08 billion, the highest in at least eight years