Zahid Hussain

While the pandemic waves on, the budget should focus on crisis management, prioritising spending on health, targeting fiscal support to distressed families and enterprises, restoring the functionality of education, and building on the resilience demonstrated by agriculture while keeping an eye on revenues. A business-as-usual budget like last year will miss the boat again.

In-person schooling in Bangladesh has remained shut since March 2020. Children have already lost a full year, equivalent to 0.6 learning-adjusted years of schooling based on the learning gap implied by the World Bank (WB) in its Human Capital Index (2020) for Bangladesh.

We are going through an unprecedented time, which is economically troublesome.

The new year always carries the legacy of the year gone by. Expectations for the new year are naturally conditioned by these legacies. This is true every year. But 2021 is starting from an exceptional footing. Preceded by a prolonged 10 months of unprecedented trauma and fear all the world over, 2021 inherits the legacies of a year that will go down in history as the most cursed in last hundred years.

Next fiscal is likely to be one of the most challenging years from a fiscal management perspective, among others.

Social distancing has proven to be an effective weapon for dampening the spread of coronavirus.

The coronavirus-infected economy requires dealing with the disease burden and the economic devastation caused by measures to contain the virus.

Bangladesh’s restart is happening, whether science supports it or not.

The government is hard-pressed in responding to the raging coronavirus pandemic with every resource, instrument, policy and strategy it can get its hands on.

Early data on the poverty impact of the coronavirus-induced coma of the economy, as Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman characterises it, is rather alarming.

The historical novelty of the coronavirus shock has unravelled as the lockdown continues. Bangladesh’s economic expansion is projected to face a drastic brake.

Are we doing enough to support households dependent on labour income from the formal and informal sectors in this time of distress?

The Tk 72,750 crore package announced by the prime minister promises to provide support to small and large businesses in industry and services to tide over the disruptive stage of the pandemic.

This is a good package committing 2.5 percent of GDP to keep businesses in industry and services afloat with a particular focus on protecting employment and labour income.

The government and the Bangladesh Bank have come up with several initiatives in response to the evolving public health and economic crisis.

If there ever was a challenging time for fiscal policy, this is it! The budgeting season for the government has started amidst a potential global health and economic crisis whose depth and duration are as uncertain today as when it started.

Inequality occupies a salient spot in Bangladesh’s development discourse. Most measures of inequality increased from 2000 to 2016.

The big question on economists’ mind is, how will the 9 per cent ceiling on bank lending rates impact the conduct of monetary policy?

Financial reforms have been on a reverse gear in Bangladesh. The latest being the announcement to return to a regime of interest rate repression.

This ought to be, if it already is not, the motto of stock market players in Bangladesh. Bangladesh Bank (BB) has left no stone unturned to show that it stands ready to put lipstick on everything to drive stock markets higher.