Customer will have to pay more for products and service bought from one's mobile phone as the government yesterday introduced a 5 percent value-added tax on those from next fiscal year and also raised the surcharge on handset imports.

Fy 2018-19...

It looks like another repeat story. We had a big budget that failed to achieve its targets. Now we are pushing for a bigger one with higher targets. But with the ground reality remaining the same, are we to see a story foretold for the next year?

National Budget 2018-19 ....

Interest payments get the fourth highest allocation, which is also higher than the combined allocation for health, social security and welfare in the proposed budget for 2018-19.

National Budget 2018-19...

Samidul Haque obtained a BBA degree from a private university a year ago.

The government plans following in Europe's footsteps to tap digital marketing's popularity, with Finance Minister AMA Muhith yesterday proposing introducing provisions on taxing earnings of networking tech giants such as Facebook, Google and Youtube.

Finance Minister AMA Muhith presented the FY2018-19 national budget to parliament yesterday. This is a historic event in the sense that it is his tenth consecutive budget that reflects the continuity in fiscal management.

Chamber and trade body leaders yesterday said the government would struggle to generate higher revenue in the course of implementing the budget in the election year.

Shifa Hosne and her husband have been saving up money to buy a small flat in the city, where property price is already way beyond the capacity of service holders with fixed income.

The government decision to reimpose 25 percent customs duty on rice import in a bid to protect growers is likely to fall short of expectation as most of the small farmers have already sold their produce to middlemen.

For the first time in Bangladesh, a finance minister apologised for his inability to create an opportunity to hold elaborate discussions on supplementary budget in parliament.

The government is going to connect the national savings certificate (NSC) buyers' database with that used in the creation of national identity (NID) cards to prevent the certificates from going into the hands of ineligible people.

The government is continuing to treat banks with kid gloves instead of going tough on them for the rampant financial irregularities and continued poor judgement.

The government's allocation for the power and energy sector has been rising in the last one decade, but the country is still struggling to meet the spiralling demand for energy.

Every year when the budget is placed in the parliament, Taufiq Hasan, a 35-year-old private sector employee, gets all worked up about which products and services he would have to pay more the following fiscal year.

The proposed budget for the next fiscal year is unrealistic, as it lacks significant structural and policy changes, analysts said in their immediate reaction yesterday.

The government is going to bring another 12 lakh people under social safety net programmes in the next financial year with the introduction of an electronic fund transfer system to ensure that the money goes directly to the accounts of the beneficiaries.

Fast-track projects, as the title suggests, are supposed to be implemented at breakneck speed because they boost economic activities once they are complete.