Bangladesh’s economy should be on guard for 2027 and 2028 from when the country will start to collectively pay back the interest due on four or five foreign loans taken for domestic mega-projects, according to Bangladesh Economic Association (BEA).

The government is establishing 89 laboratories to develop Bangladesh Standards and Testing Institution (BSTI) as a world-class institution, Industries Minister Nurul Majid Mahmud Humayun said today.

The Directorate of National Consumers Right Protection (DNCRP) today fined 82 traders Tk 4.94 lakh across the country for their failure to protect consumers’ rights.

Employees of all banks operating in Bangladesh will not be able to travel abroad from now on as the central bank has stepped up its efforts to stop the foreign currency reserves from sliding further. 

The stocks in Bangladesh continued to fall for the eighth consecutive day today.

The construction work of Bscic Chemical Industrial Park in Munshiganj will be completed by December 2023 if everything goes according to plan, said Industries Minister Nurul Majid Mahmud Humayun.

Despite a lot of stress, the Bangladeshi taka remains one of the strong currencies in the region. No doubt, the taka is still overvalued and consequently, it is trying to realign itself with the value of the US dollar through measured depreciation.

A good number of farmers in Rangpur have been earning unexpected profits from growing mint, a medicinal crop, on small patches of land.

Retail prices of wheat flour recently shot up to a 15-year high amid concerns of a supply shortage in local markets after India banned exports of the staple food in order to ensure its availability at home in the face of rising global costs due to Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Although the corporate tax levied on listed firms is lower than that of their non-listed counterparts, many companies in Bangladesh lack interest in joining the stock market as they want to avoid the obligation of ensuring good corporate governance, regularly disclosing financial information and complying with other rules.

The taka faced less depreciation against the US dollar compared to other South Asian currencies in the last one year, eroding the export competitiveness of Bangladesh against its peers.

Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s economic philosophy gives equal importance to public and private sectors and co-operatives in terms of ownership of industries, said Binayak Sen, director general of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS), yesterday.

The upcoming budget for fiscal year 2022-23 should focus on checking inflation to give relief to the poor, lower middle and middle-income people, not on the higher gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate, said economists yesterday.

Moody’s on Friday cut Ukraine’s debt rating for the second time in three months and lowered the outlook to negative due to the growing risk the Russian invasion will affect the nation’s debt sustainability.

Transparency International Bangladesh today (May 20, 2022) called upon the government to form an independent "Economic Strategy Advisory Committee" to advise on ways to address the potential global economic fallout and ensure continued commendable economic performance achieved so far.

Litchi production in Magura has increased ten fold compared to what it was a decade ago thanks to favourable weather and soil conditions this year.

Editors yesterday urged the government to bring down the corporate tax for newspapers to 10-15 per cent from the fiscal year of 2022-23 to help the print media survive amid rising costs.

There is a huge hue and cry about the recent unprecedented price hike of soybean oil.

The pace of profit growth of pharmaceutical companies in Bangladesh slowed in the January-March period of the current financial year compared to a year ago because of higher operating costs despite bigger sales.

The government knew who were responsible for the recent acute shortage of soybean oil but did not enforce the law as it would have made the situation even more volatile, said the chief of the consumer rights body yesterday.