Mustafa Kamal joins Muhith to disagree with World Bank forecast

Planning Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal has joined Finance Minister AMA Muhith to dismiss the Wold Bank’s forecast on the country’s growth prospects.

Senior Correspondentbdnews24.com
Published : 15 April 2015, 06:07 PM
Updated : 15 April 2015, 06:08 PM

He said Bangladesh’s economy grew at the rate of 6.5 percent in the first nine months (July-March) of the 2014-15 fiscal year.
 
He claimed the political turmoil since the beginning of January had resulted in only 0.1 percent of GDP loss.
 
He expected the growth to be between 6.5 and 7.0 percent in the current fiscal year.
 
He was briefing the media in Dhaka on Wednesday.
 
The World Bank in a report on Sunday said Bangladesh faced a loss of $2.2 billion, which is one percent of its GDP.
 
It forecast that the growth would be 5.6 percent in this fiscal year.
 
Finance Minister Muhith said he did not attach much importance to predictions by the World Bank and other global organisations.
 
“The World Bank, IMF and ADB are always wrong in their projections,” he said at a programme hours after global lender’s report was published.
 
The planning minister on Wednesday said the World Bank projection of 5.6 percent growth was ‘baseless’.
 
“The transport sector faced a loss due to the political unrest. The cost of businesses has also increased but no factory was harmed. No worker lost job,” Kamal said.
 
The minister also said he believed the economic growth would never go below six percent even though ‘shutdowns are called daily throughout a year’.
 
He published data showing improvements in several sectors in the first nine months of the current fiscal year.
 
He hoped there would be bumper crops this year.
 
Kamal said the industry sector grew at 9.38 percent in the July-March period, while small industries saw 10.66 percent growth.
 
Subsectors wholesale and retail will probably grow at 8.54 percent, he said.
 
He admitted that the transport sector’s growth would not be significant.
 
According to the minister, revenue growth was 16.42 percent.
 
“We collected 68,698 crore taka in the same period last year. This year, the amount is 79,978 crore taka,” he said.