BBS to publish quarterly GDP data from next year

The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) is taking necessary preparations to publish quarterly reports on the country's gross domestic product (GDP) from next year.

The state-run statistical agency's decision meets one of the conditions of International Monetary Fund's (IMF) recent $4.7 billion loan for Bangladesh. The GDP data used to be made public annually.

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In addition, the BBS has also completed compiling provisional and the final data of the country's GDP for the past 50 years since Bangladesh achieved independence.

Md Matiar Rahman, director general of the BBS, shared the information after a meeting with an IMF delegation in Dhaka yesterday.

The BBS is catering to the Finance Division's request for publishing hard and soft copies of the 50 years' GDP data, offering a new method for formulating the consumer price index (CPI) and making public a quarterly GDP report, he said.

"We have also informed the IMF team about updating our consumer price index. We have included 722 food and non-food items under 12 categories while it was 412 items under eight categories," he said.

Now 95 per cent of countries follow this method as intake of food items has increased in Bangladesh, which was not incorporated in the previous method, he said.

"We will publish the CPI report with the updated list from April while the target was to publish it from July," said Rahman.