The Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) has urged the government to prepare a realistic budget with a clear implementation pathway for the upcoming fiscal year 2022-23.
The CPD, a think tank and research organisation, also gave some recommendations for the budget focusing on the country’s graduation to a developing economy by 2026, budget implementation structure strengthening, and budget allocation based on risk factors and their recovery plan.
The CPD disclosed its budget recommendation at a press conference, held at CPD’s office in Dhanmondi on Tuesday, reports UNB.
Dr. Fahmida Khatun, CPD’s Executive Director, read out the budget proposals, while professor Mustafizur Rahman, distinguished fellow of CPD, Khondaker Golam Moazzem, research director and Towfiqul Islam Khan, senior research fellow, replied to queries from reporters about the recommendations.
The CPD stressed reforming the overall tax-revenue sector both in technological advancement and institutional capability and set a unified tax system along with justifying tax exemption facilities.
After graduation, Bangladesh will face a challenge in imposing import duty, which is needed to adjust the revenue earning plan in line with the post-LDC situation.
The CPD urged more transparency, institutional accountability in public expenditure along with general accessibility in the data of public expenditure to ensure good governance.
The export incentive sector needs to reform with a unified system so that the real eligible sector can only get the incentives.
The CPD urged to increase budget expenditure in education, the agriculture sector, children, and women's health development to build a healthy and developed nation by 2030.
The budget recommendations have also focused on increasing allocation for social safety nets in phases for pandemic recovery and the global impact of food price hikes.
The recommendations said that the marginal people are very much suffering due to the pandemic, while food inflation pushing price hike makes their life miserable further.
The fixed income group and marginal people would face nutrition problems if the food becomes costlier as their income was affected by the pandemic and it is not resilient so far. The budget needs to set incentives for marginal people in different shapes like subsidies in food prices.
The think tank proposed a stable exchange rate of Bangladesh Taka with US dollar as it impacted both the price hike of commodities in the domestic market and increased the price of industrial production cost.
Appreciating the government strategy of pandemic recovery, CPD said the government policy is right but implementation is complex and sometimes delay the process of distribution.