Bangladesh's economic performance in terms of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been able to maintain a steady growth even in the face of odds over the past few years. This has baffled its international development partners as well as global economic trend watchers. Interestingly, immediately before the pandemic, multilateral lenders like the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and some UN agencies were forecasting that Bangladesh's growth during pandemic time would be considerably reduced. But another global economic trend tracker, the London-based Economist came up with an optimistic projection about the economy. And it ranked Bangladesh as the ninth strongest among 66 emerging economies of the world. Of course, the evaluation took into account the pandemic-induced risks that the key indicators reflecting the economy's health were exposed to. As expected, those included public and foreign debts, borrowing cost and reserve cover. Obviously, in The Economist's view, Bangladesh was better placed to get around those risks. No doubt, all this points to the vigour of Bangladesh's economy which has been recognised internationally.
But there is yet another not-so-flattering aspect of the economy that is equally baffling. It is that the economy, despite its otherwise successful performance in GDP terms, has not been able to create jobs, draw foreign direct investment (FDI), address widening income disparity and reduce poverty. In that event, if an economy's growth fails to deliver the goods, the entire exercise of growth calculations based on GDP comes into question. Small wonder that such paradoxical disconnect between abstract growth figures and their expected impacts on life and livelihood came under a closer scrutiny at a recent city webinar organised by an economic think tank. Notably, stakeholders including experts and government leaders converged more or less on the view that there should be an answer to the apparent dichotomy.
It is up to the government to clarify the reason why it is so. Otherwise, the beneficiaries of any economic growth, the public in general, will lose faith in the government's development work. And the question will arise if the claimed growth is sustainable in the long run. On this score, the government would be required to delve deeper into all the five-year plans that were executed in the past and look for weaknesses in their implementation.
It is important that the government carried out this post-mortem to track down the root causes of the problem. Also, it will be necessary to ensure that the same deficiencies may not crop up again after its launching of the eighth five-year plan. On this score, it would be sensible to be alive to the fact that any future economic plan will remain exposed to the still raging pandemic and its inescapable impacts on the economy. So, the economic planners would do well to take such risks into due account. As such, it would be well-advised not to rush anything out in such uncertain times. At the same time, the government needs to invest some more time in deliberating on what is coming in the way of private investment growth and FDI inflow; why the key financial and monetary areas like commercial banks, bond market, capital market and insurance are still struggling. In this context, the policymakers may give a serious thought to the suggestion made by some economists that the economy and the public health should be given a couple of years' space before setting a higher growth target in the next five-year plan.
