Where are we heading?
By bringing down a despotic leviathan, the anti-discrimination student movement has earned the moral authority to be spokespersons for the whole nation
3m ago
Rebooting the economy
The crackdown on the nonviolent uprise of the students and the subsequent one thing leading to another chain of events locked down the economy, only figuratively reminiscent of the pandemic in 2020
4m ago
Not much beyond lip service
In their Monetary Policy Statement (MPS) for the first half of FY25, Bangladesh Bank (BB) has stuck to the policy stance already in place.
4m ago
Not much beyond lip service
Let’s begin with the central question to gauge what more this MPS could have done to increase the potency of monetary policy in restoring macro-financial stability.
4m ago
Export data correction was long overdue
Bangladesh Bank’s latest data on the balance of payments has remarkably altered the narrative on the drivers of external stress without changing the signal on the overall stress.
4m ago
Making sense of revisions in balance of payments
Bangladesh Bank's latest data on the balance of payments has remarkably altered the narrative on the drivers of external stress without changing the signal on the overall stress. The bottom line on persistent external imbalance remains pretty much the same but the composition is palpably different
4m ago
A post-election defining moment
The economy has been in a rough patch since 2022 like never before in the past decade and a half
5m ago
Fifty years of learning from rises and slips in the Bangladesh economy
We are hubristically living through our ecological implosion.
7m ago
May 17, 2021
Budgeting to make a difference
While the pandemic waves on, the budget should focus on crisis management, prioritising spending on health, targeting fiscal support to distressed families and enterprises, restoring the functionality of education, and building on the resilience demonstrated by agriculture while keeping an eye on revenues. A business-as-usual budget like last year will miss the boat again.
April 8, 2021
Pursuing new approaches to deliver quality education is key
In-person schooling in Bangladesh has remained shut since March 2020. Children have already lost a full year, equivalent to 0.6 learning-adjusted years of schooling based on the learning gap implied by the World Bank (WB) in its Human Capital Index (2020) for Bangladesh.
March 8, 2021
Activities back, incomes not
We are going through an unprecedented time, which is economically troublesome.
December 30, 2020
Expectations From 2021: Vaccination, education and sustained economic recovery
The new year always carries the legacy of the year gone by. Expectations for the new year are naturally conditioned by these legacies. This is true every year. But 2021 is starting from an exceptional footing. Preceded by a prolonged 10 months of unprecedented trauma and fear all the world over, 2021 inherits the legacies of a year that will go down in history as the most cursed in last hundred years.
June 4, 2020
Next budget would be an immense balancing act
Next fiscal is likely to be one of the most challenging years from a fiscal management perspective, among others.
May 22, 2020
The economics of social distancing
Social distancing has proven to be an effective weapon for dampening the spread of coronavirus.
May 15, 2020
Next fiscal year’s budget priorities must be aligned with the needs of the pandemic-hit economy
The coronavirus-infected economy requires dealing with the disease burden and the economic devastation caused by measures to contain the virus.
May 10, 2020
Our sudden and decentralised restart is hard to fathom
Bangladesh’s restart is happening, whether science supports it or not.
April 27, 2020
Technology is a useful servant. Let’s harness it for social protection, social distancing and community testing.
The government is hard-pressed in responding to the raging coronavirus pandemic with every resource, instrument, policy and strategy it can get its hands on.
April 21, 2020
Cash transfer is the assistance the poor need right now
Early data on the poverty impact of the coronavirus-induced coma of the economy, as Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman characterises it, is rather alarming.
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