It seems the Bangladesh economy is stuck in a time warp, going by the latest edition of the Labour Force Survey unveiled yesterday.

The current low revenue base in Bangladesh could be further undermined by the measures taken in the budget for FY2023, including corporate tax cuts, American credit rating agency Fitch said in its latest report.

Specific policy incentives are needed to stimulate the economy and revive the labour market.

An economy without an independent source of data is like an aircraft flying without its airspeed sensors.

Bangladesh Bank yesterday substantially relaxed the policy for rescheduling defaulted loans, allowing defaulters to repay term loans over a maximum period of eight years whereas it was previously two years.

The Bangladesh Bank (BB) has revealed its Monetary Policy Statement (MPS) for the period of July-December 2022 at a time when the country, and the world, is going through tough economic challenges.

The Bangladesh government has set a target of 7.5 per cent growth of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) in the upcoming fiscal year of 2022-23 beginning from July.

The International Monetary Fund has revised down its economic growth projection for Bangladesh to 6.4 percent for the current fiscal year largely because of Russia-Ukraine war and supply chain disruptions.

Finance Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal today said the GDP growth of the country would be higher than the government's estimate, not only the World Bank's projection.

The central bank yesterday unveiled a cautiously optimistic monetary policy for the second half of the fiscal year, keeping room to provide adequate supply of quality credit to support the growth and inflation targets.

Budget implementation capacity of Bangladesh has been falling consistently for the last seven fiscal years, exposing poor capacity of government agencies, The Daily Star reported on June 4, 2018. Despite a sustained increase in GDP growth rate for over a decade, the implementing capacity has dropped from 97 percent in 2010-11 to a mere 78 percent in 2016-17, it further adds.

Bangladesh has become one of Asia's most remarkable and unexpected success stories in recent years. Once one of the poorest regions of Pakistan, Bangladesh remained an economic basket case—wracked by poverty and famine—for many years after independence in 1971. In fact, by 2006, conditions seemed so hopeless that when Bangladesh registered faster growth than Pakistan, it was dismissed as a fluke.

At a recent press conference, representatives of the World Bank (WB) questioned the 7.65 percent economic growth estimate and the estimate of 7–8 percent growth of domestic demand that the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) came up with for FY17-18. Zahid Hussain, lead economist of the WB's Dhaka office, said there are two causes that could lead to such a spike (growth of employment and labour

Planning Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal is shocked over the downsized projection by the development partners (DP) on the country’s economic growth in the current fiscal year.

The Asian Development Bank projects 7 percent economic growth for Bangladesh for the current fiscal year, much below than the government’s provisional estimate of 7.65 percent.

Bangladesh has achieved a record economic growth of 7.28 percent in the last fiscal year despite a fall in rice production and also in industrial growth. The gross domestic product rose by 0.17 percentage points in fiscal 2016-17 from 7.11 percent in the previous fiscal year, according to Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics data.

Bangladesh has ascertained its growth for the last fiscal at 7.28 percent, highest ever in history of the country’s economy and more than what was targeted.

Debapriya Bhattacharya, the distinguished fellow of CPD, terms the proposed budget for the FY 2017-18 as “economic illusion” saying that there is no clear indication between income and expenditure in it.

Finance Minister AMA Muhith has really dreamt of a big budget in every respect -- from expenditure to revenue generation. And he no longer wants to live in the 6 percent GDP class to push beyond 7 percent. But his big dream promises to put extra pressure on people across the board, as he plans through his VAT and other tax proposals to extract that extra penny from every pocket.

It is well known that since the 1980s, Bangladesh has made astonishing progress on a wide variety of development indicators such as reducing the prevalence of extreme hunger and poverty...