Exports actually fell in July-May

Bangladesh's exports declined 4.28 percent year-on-year in July-May of 2023-24, said the central bank yesterday after correcting the shipment data published by the Export Promotion Bureau (EPB) earlier.

On June 5, the EPB said exports grew 2.01 percent to $51.54 billion in the first 11 months of the last fiscal year.

The Bangladesh Bank said the actual shipment was worth $40.72 billion during the period, a decrease of $10.82 billion, or 21 percent, from the figure released by the EPB.

However, the export figure for May published by the EPB was close to the BB's number. Both agencies reported a $4 billion worth of shipments for the month.

The BB unveiled the export data in its weekly selected economic indicators, a week after it said actual exports in July-April of FY24 were nearly $14 billion below the shipment value reported by the EPB.

The mismatch comes as the BB found six types of statistical wrongdoing for the inflated export data. Anomalies range from serial duplication errors to miscalculations of the value of fabrics to repeated miscounts of sample items as exports.

The central bank said exports fell 6.8 percent during the 10-month period against the EPB's claim of a 3.93 percent increase.

The discrepancy in export data came to the BB's notice over the last year as the gap has widened. The difference has been growing for at least 12 years, with the gap crossing $12 billion in 2022-23.

At a consultation meeting with stakeholders at the BB headquarters on Wednesday, BB Governor Abdur Rouf Talukder said the export data has been corrected.

"Now the release of accurate export figures will continue," he said, adding a new methodology had been developed by the EPB, the National Board of Revenue, and the BB to report the actual export earnings.

Under the initiative, a platform will be developed to publish real-time data on exports to ensure data accuracy. As per the plan, the NBR will supply the daily export data to the EPB, and the BB will compute it based on the real-time exchange rate.