Selim Raihan

Traditional protection is becoming costly in the pursuit of competitiveness

Bangladesh Bank’s first-ever quarterly Monetary Policy Statement is an important institutional change.

The decision to keep the repo rate unchanged at 9.5 percent is understandable.

The government has yet to explain clearly how it intends to contain these additional inflationary pressures

For Bangladesh’s government employees, the new pay scale brings understandable relief after years of high inflation and rising living costs.

Bangladesh’s latest external sector numbers deserve closer scrutiny than the reassuring headline of rising remittances suggests. A closer reading reveals an economy gradually losing one of its traditional sources of resilience: steady inflows of concessional foreign financing.

While remittances continue to support foreign exchange earnings, the simultaneous decline in foreign loan commitments and disbursements, coupled with rising debt repayments, points to a tightening external financing environment

The other day, Prime Minister Tarique Rahman reaffirmed his government’s commitment to transforming Bangladesh into a $1 trillion economy by 2034. While the ambition is welcome, there is a policy puzzle that needs to be encountered