Rejaul Karim Byron

Inflation rose to 6.44 per cent in October, the highest in at least five years, driven by a sharp increase in the price of food items, official figures showed yesterday.

Banks disbursed 48 per cent of Tk 76,000 crore funds they have been entrusted with lending to the sectors creaking under the pressure of the coronavirus pandemic as of September, official data showed.

The government will seek approval for the first revision of the Aminbazar-Maowa-Mongla Transmission Line Project today as it increases the cost by 85 per cent and extends the deadline by six months.

Expatriates sent home USD 2.11 billion in remittances in October this year, which is 28.62 percent higher than the same month last year, a top official of Bangladesh Bank has said. With this, the total remittance earnings from first four months of the ongoing fiscal year have been USD 8.83 billion, which is 43.42 percent higher compared to the same period in the previous fiscal year.

Remittance flow to Bangladesh is likely to grow by 8 percent in 2020, compared to that of the previous year.

Diversion of remittances from informal to formal channels due to the difficulty of carrying money under travel restrictions amid the coronavirus pandemic, incentives granted to remitters and damages inflicted by the recent floods helped Bangladesh bring the remittance flow back to the positive territory in 2020, according to the World Bank.

The retail price of coarse rice rose Tk 15 per kilogram in the last one year because of higher prices in the international market, squeezed supply and the coronavirus pandemic, official data showed.

The government yesterday announced to buy paddy and rice at prices that are below the production cost, raising doubts whether it would be able to attain the procurement target of the staple to build an adequate public stock.

The government yesterday revised the cost of two projects upwards by 28.72 per cent as perennial problems of complexity in land acquisition and frequent changes to project directors continue to delay construction and raise expenditures.

The government has decided to administer Covid-19 vaccines to all the citizens free of cost once those are procured.

The government’s bank borrowing plunged 90 per cent to Tk 3,033 crore in the first quarter of the fiscal year because of the slower development activities and lower than expected spending on subsidies and paddy and rice procurement.

The government is aggressively seeking financial assistance from development partners to procure Covid-19 vaccine as soon as it hits markets.

Foreign nationals working legally and illegally in the local, foreign and multinational companies in Bangladesh send home billions of dollars every year, but there is no reliable data that can capture the true extent of the outbound remittance.

A nuclear reactor and a steam generator, the key components of the first unit of Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant, arrived in Bangladesh yesterday, paving the way for completing the main phase of the mega project.

Development spending rose 16 per cent year-on-year to Tk 8,950 crore in September in a reassuring development for the government desperately trying to give a leg-up to the economy reeling from the coronavirus pandemic.

The debate over Bangladesh’s GDP growth forecasts is back again. There is wide variation in the projections made by the multilateral development agencies for the current fiscal year amid deep uncertainties about the near-term trajectory of the global economy as the pandemic is still raging.

Bangladesh surpassing India in per capita GDP in 2020 as forecast by the International Monetary Fund is not a fluke and is rather a reflection of the country’s steady economic growth and a solid foundation, said economists yesterday.

The disbursement of allowances for retrenched workers in the export-oriented garment, leather and footwear sectors will begin once the associations concerned provide the list of employees, according to a senior official of the finance ministry.

Bangladesh is set to surpass India in terms of per capita gross domestic product (GDP) in 2020 thanks to robust agriculture production, exports and remittance despite the coronavirus pandemic, in another testimony to the country’s steadily growing economy.

The finance ministry has softened its stance on the disbursement of funds from the annual development programme for the low-priority projects bowing down to pressures from the line ministries and also because of the improvement in revenue collection.