Bangladesh Bank has held its key policy repo rate steady at 10 percent for the first half of the current fiscal year, reaffirming its commitment to a tight monetary stance aimed at curbing persistent inflation, weak private investment, and growing uncertainty over global trade.
Diversifying Bangladesh’s export basket has been a high-priority policy objective for many years.
Some banks are simply non-viable and suffer from inherent governance problems.
There is ample evidence showing that both domestic and foreign direct investment (FDI) have a significant positive effect on economic growth.
The finance ministry has identified seven major challenges including tight monetary and fiscal policies, taken to tame elevated inflation levels for more than three years, in next fiscal year that may increase unemployment.
The estimate is almost close to the projection by the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) 3.8 percent for the year.
The silver lining is that the economy isn’t falling apart
The Bangladesh Bank will consider slashing the policy rate to 7 percent by March, provided that rampant inflation, which has hovered above 9 percent for nearly two years, eases to 5 percent by then, Governor Ahsan H Mansur said yesterday.
Bangladesh's agro-processed exports are already rising.
It seems the government is doing an about-turn from the austerity stance taken at the start of the fiscal year.
Bangladesh should be careful about falling into the middle-income trap, said Axel van Trotsenburg, the World Bank’s managing director of operations.
Bangladesh’s balance of payments (BoP) deficit would widen massively in the current fiscal year than the central bank had earlier projected owing to escalated imports, lower remittances and export receipts, and higher accumulation of debts.
The Bangladesh Bank is yet to take any visible measure in line with a commerce ministry directive aimed at asking banks to earmark a portion of their foreign currency holdings to open letters of credit to import essentials ahead of Ramadan.
We are told that taka is available, and then it’s not there anymore.
Bangladesh’s $4.5 billion loan programme with the International Monetary Fund is expected to get the final approval on January 30, said the lender’s visiting top official yesterday.
Bangladesh Bank yesterday unveiled a wishy-washy monetary policy for the next six months that will prove to be ineffective in tackling the headwinds passing through the economy.
There would not be any further negotiations on the $4.5 billion loan programme during International Monetary Fund’s deputy managing director Antoinette Monsio Sayeh’s forthcoming visit to Bangladesh.
The World Bank yesterday delivered yet another bad news for the economy as the Washington-based multilateral lender pared back Bangladesh’s growth forecast for this fiscal year by 1.5 percent to 5.2 percent.
This year was always supposed to be a celebration of Bangladesh’s economic progress with the opening of Padma bridge and Dhaka metro rail and 100 percent electrification.