BBS misses deadline to publish quarterly GDP report

The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) has missed its December deadline to publish a quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) report, under a move to provide a timely status of the health of the economy.

GDP measures the monetary value of final goods and services produced in a country in a given period of time. Bangladesh publishes it on an annual basis and the real figure is known much after a fiscal year ends.

So, bringing out the first quarter GDP report for the current fiscal year by December 2023 was one of the conditions laid out by the structural reform programme set by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for its $4.7 billion loan.

The move is designed to enhance the Bangladesh Bank's monitoring and policy-making capacity, according to an IMF document.

It will also help policymakers analyse whether their targets for factors such as economic growth are on the right track and provide insight into whether corrective measures are needed.

The central bank has already announced two monetary policies this fiscal year: once in July and once in January. However, although over one month has passed since the deadline, the BBS has not published the quarterly GDP report.

A second review mission of the IMF will arrive in April and assess the targets that Bangladesh has met and has not met before approving the third tranche of the loan.

Finance ministry officials said that this was one of the structural conditions so they would comply with it before the second review. It will not pose any obstacle to getting the loan, they added.

Many countries, including Saarc countries, regularly publish quarterly GDP, but Bangladesh has not launched it yet.

In Bangladesh, a provisional GDP report is published near the end of the fiscal year while the final report is only published three to four months after the conclusion of a fiscal year.

"We have prepared this for the first time, so we have sent it to the honourable prime minister for approval. Once we get the approval, we will publish the report," Shahnaz Arefin, secretary to the Statistics and Informatics Division, told The Daily Star.

She added: "We are not publishing this because of the IMF's conditions."

At a meeting in 2020-21, the Economic Relations Divisions, the finance ministry, and the Planning Commission decided to move towards publishing a quarterly GDP report because most Saarc countries do it, according to the secretary.

"The move had faced some problems. But we have managed to resolve them with the IMF's help."

The secretary said BBS officials were given 12 training sessions to help them publish the quarterly GDP report. "That took some time, but now we will regularly publish the data."

The BBS has already carried out back calculations and published GDP reports, beginning from the fiscal year 2015-2016 to 2022-23, in order to prepare the data for the current financial year.

The reports have already been published on the statistical agency's website. Now, it is aiming to publish fresh data for the first time this fiscal year.