Food inflation slipped to 10.76 percent last month from 12.56 percent in October.

Food inflation at 12.56 percent in October this year is the highest in a decade

Says CPD’s Mustafizur Rahman

In the past 18 months, Bangladesh has largely failed to take appropriate measures to curb higher inflation and reverse the fall of foreign currency reserves, both at the heart of the country’s persisting economic plight.

WB Country Director Abdoulaye Seck says at AmCham meeting

It was 9.92% in Aug

The Bangladesh Bank will not be making any drastic policy changes ahead of the national election scheduled for January, putting all its focus on tackling the depleting foreign exchange reserves and refraining from printing money to give loans to the government.

The government’s borrowing from the banking system has remained in check so far in the ongoing fiscal year thanks to lower expenditures and higher revenue collection.   

The Bangladesh Bank is going to take a raft of policy measures to tackle inflationary pressure, volatility in the foreign exchange market and growing non-performing loans (NPLs) and give a much-needed boost to the forex reserve.

A persistently higher inflation for more than a year has hit the low-income, the poor and the fixed-income people in Bangladesh hard, significantly eroding their purchasing power.  

Although higher consumer prices have persisted in the first few months of the current fiscal year, inflation in Bangladesh is going to cool in the later part of 2023-24 thanks to one external and two domestic factors, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) forecast yesterday.

The government should have figured out how to rein in food inflation by now.

Govt should make major changes before finalising it.

Inflation in Bangladesh fell slightly to 9.24 per cent in April, driven by a decline in food prices, although it still remains at an elevated level compared to historic trends, official figures showed yesterday.

Inflation in Bangladesh climbed to 9.33 per cent in March, maintaining the escalated price level.

The government is set to increase the amount of allowance under the social safety net programme in the next budget to cushion the poor from the impacts of high inflation.

It is high time the government and policymakers took this problem seriously.

The Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries yesterday started selling milk, eggs and meat at “affordable prices” across 20 locations inside Dhaka in a bid to stabilise the market during Ramadan.

There are at least three laws and as many government bodies to protect the consumers from price manipulation, but it goes on unabated due to lax enforcement of the laws and a lack of coordination among the government organisations, say commodity experts.

Bangladesh has been facing persistent high inflation over the last one year