Rejaul Karim Byron

A nuclear reactor and a steam generator, the key components of the first unit of Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant, arrived in Bangladesh yesterday, paving the way for completing the main phase of the mega project.

Development spending rose 16 per cent year-on-year to Tk 8,950 crore in September in a reassuring development for the government desperately trying to give a leg-up to the economy reeling from the coronavirus pandemic.

The debate over Bangladesh’s GDP growth forecasts is back again. There is wide variation in the projections made by the multilateral development agencies for the current fiscal year amid deep uncertainties about the near-term trajectory of the global economy as the pandemic is still raging.

Bangladesh surpassing India in per capita GDP in 2020 as forecast by the International Monetary Fund is not a fluke and is rather a reflection of the country’s steady economic growth and a solid foundation, said economists yesterday.

The disbursement of allowances for retrenched workers in the export-oriented garment, leather and footwear sectors will begin once the associations concerned provide the list of employees, according to a senior official of the finance ministry.

Bangladesh is set to surpass India in terms of per capita gross domestic product (GDP) in 2020 thanks to robust agriculture production, exports and remittance despite the coronavirus pandemic, in another testimony to the country’s steadily growing economy.

The finance ministry has softened its stance on the disbursement of funds from the annual development programme for the low-priority projects bowing down to pressures from the line ministries and also because of the improvement in revenue collection.

People are increasingly returning to jobs they had lost to the coronavirus pandemic despite the persisting health risks and the wage growth failing to keep pace with the rebounding economy.

The government has decided to use the country’s ballooning foreign exchange reserves to implement development projects.

One in every 10 people in the capital may have already been infected with Covid-19, says the World Bank, warning that the coronavirus pandemic is not likely to pass anytime soon.

Bangladesh’s economy may make a U-shaped recovery if the government spends proactively and can tap into international resources even though output is set to fall drastically in the next two fiscal years because of the prolonged coronavirus pandemic, World Bank said yesterday.

Inflation rose for the second consecutive month in September driven by an increase in the price of both food and non-food items, official figures showed yesterday.

Students, rickshaw-pullers and labourers faced the worst financial hardship during pandemic whereas government employees and teachers were least impacted by it, reported Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS).

Bangladesh may seek more than $2.5 billion from World Bank in budgetary support, project financing and aid as it has to implement a major portion of the country’s gigantic stimulus package to revive the economy.

The government has undertaken a programme worth $550 million with an aim to procure and distribute coronavirus vaccines.

The government has undertaken a programme worth $550 million with an aim to procure and distribute coronavirus vaccines.

The government is aiming to clock more than 8 per cent economic growth on average during the Eight Five-Year Plan period as it hopes that the impacts of the devastating coronavirus pandemic would fade in the second half of the current fiscal year.

A South Korean joint venture is likely to be engaged in turning the Dhaka-Mymensingh highway into an expressway under a public private partnership (PPP) initiative.

Implementation of government’s stimulus package, announced to absorb the economic shock from the coronavirus pandemic, saw a mixed progress as around 26 percent of the massive Tk 111,141-crore scheme was disbursed in four months till July.

Around 68 percent of the people who had to stop working in urban areas of Dhaka and Chattogram due to the pandemic have lost their jobs, according to a World Bank report.