Rejaul Karim Byron

The country’s food reserve dropped to 8.8 lakh tonnes on Sunday, despite bumper grain production in the last fiscal year.

The government is going to take up a Tk 5,905-crore project to repair rural roads and fix infrastructure damaged by Cyclone Amphan, floods and heavy rains this year.

A Chinese company will set up the country’s first large-scale waste-to-energy plant for Dhaka North City Corporation areas.

Development spending rose to a four-month high of Tk 10,151 crore in October as the government has accelerated expenditure to revive the economy reeling under the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.

Investment has not picked up in Bangladesh despite the reopening of the economy five months back largely due to the deep uncertainty caused by the coronavirus pandemic which continues to creep along.

Workers in Bangladesh are still making do with lower wages compared to the pre-pandemic level as the ongoing economic growth has not translated into higher incomes for them in a major way.

A new rule framed by India on determining the country of origin of a product is going to hurt Bangladesh’s exports to India and undermine the efforts to narrow large trade imbalance between the two neighbours, according to two government agencies.

Inflation rose to 6.44 per cent in October, the highest in at least five years, driven by a sharp increase in the price of food items, official figures showed yesterday.

Banks disbursed 48 per cent of Tk 76,000 crore funds they have been entrusted with lending to the sectors creaking under the pressure of the coronavirus pandemic as of September, official data showed.

The government will seek approval for the first revision of the Aminbazar-Maowa-Mongla Transmission Line Project today as it increases the cost by 85 per cent and extends the deadline by six months.

Expatriates sent home USD 2.11 billion in remittances in October this year, which is 28.62 percent higher than the same month last year, a top official of Bangladesh Bank has said. With this, the total remittance earnings from first four months of the ongoing fiscal year have been USD 8.83 billion, which is 43.42 percent higher compared to the same period in the previous fiscal year.

Remittance flow to Bangladesh is likely to grow by 8 percent in 2020, compared to that of the previous year.

Diversion of remittances from informal to formal channels due to the difficulty of carrying money under travel restrictions amid the coronavirus pandemic, incentives granted to remitters and damages inflicted by the recent floods helped Bangladesh bring the remittance flow back to the positive territory in 2020, according to the World Bank.

The retail price of coarse rice rose Tk 15 per kilogram in the last one year because of higher prices in the international market, squeezed supply and the coronavirus pandemic, official data showed.

The government yesterday announced to buy paddy and rice at prices that are below the production cost, raising doubts whether it would be able to attain the procurement target of the staple to build an adequate public stock.

The government yesterday revised the cost of two projects upwards by 28.72 per cent as perennial problems of complexity in land acquisition and frequent changes to project directors continue to delay construction and raise expenditures.

The government has decided to administer Covid-19 vaccines to all the citizens free of cost once those are procured.

The government’s bank borrowing plunged 90 per cent to Tk 3,033 crore in the first quarter of the fiscal year because of the slower development activities and lower than expected spending on subsidies and paddy and rice procurement.

The government is aggressively seeking financial assistance from development partners to procure Covid-19 vaccine as soon as it hits markets.

Foreign nationals working legally and illegally in the local, foreign and multinational companies in Bangladesh send home billions of dollars every year, but there is no reliable data that can capture the true extent of the outbound remittance.