Dr Debapriya Bhattacharya speaks at a press briefing on the proposed budget in the capital’s Brac Centre Inn on Friday.
The proposed budget is a surreal venture with a big gap in income and expenditure, Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), a private think-tank, said on Friday.
The think-tank said allowing black money in flat, plot and land would act as counter-productive for the growth of the industries as the prices of land might jump further.
Finance Minister AMA Muhith on Thursday placed the budget of Tk 222,491 crore at parliament for the 2013-’14financial year.
Various aspects of the proposed budget needed to be rectified in the midterm considering the real circumstances,” Dr Debapriya Bhattacharya, a distinguished fellow of the CPD, said while speaking at a press briefing on the proposed budget in the capital’s Brac Centre Inn.
“Political and economic reality, world economic condition and institutional ability to materialise the budget might bring this change in the time to come,” he said.
“The economy has taken a downturn though a balance is visible. We have observed it after analysing the whole — positive and negative aspects — of the last financial year,” Bhattacharya said.
The CPD study also found that dependency on foreign fund and bank loans will create problem for the private sector.
In the next FY the GDP growth target has been set at 7.2 percent instead of 7.6 which clearly marked a balance between last year’s experience where it had been down to 6.03 percent, Bhattacharya said.
“In the proposed budget we have brought it down which was supposed to be 7.6 to balance our midterm estimation,” he said.
Increase in public investment, tightening grip on inflation, remaining surpluses from the income and spending and flow of remittance played a big role in the backdrop of the proposed budget for the fiscal 2013-14, said the economist.
On the other hand, the failures of the last FY were not able to meet the growth target, down flow of the private sector, inadequate revenue earnings, dependency on bank loans and a weakness in the country’s financial demands, Bhattacharya observed.
It is a tradition that CPD gives its formal reaction on Bangladesh’s annual budget on the following day of the budget announcement.
Source: The Daily Star
