It could even reach 6.8pc
“Growth rate in the current fiscal won’t be less than 6.3 percent; it can be as high as 6.7 to 6.8 percent,” he said while speaking at a dividend handover ceremony of the UAE-Bangladesh Investment Company Limited held at the Ministry of Finance.
Mentioning the public sector performance as excellent, Muhith said the flow of foreign aid is also good in the current year. “As a result, the public sector investment has gone up by 1.65 percent this year.”
He said that with this increase, the deficit in the private sector has been covered and in some cases surpassed expectations “If there is higher investment, then the growth rates go upward.”
On the confusion to some extent about the ADP size for the next fiscal year, the Finance Minister said the next ADP includes self-financed programmes of the autonomous institutions. So, excluding the allocations of the autonomous bodies, the real ADP size stood at around Tk 66,000 crore.
Referring to the downward GDP growth projection of 6.03 percent in the outgoing fiscal year from the original target of 7.2 percent made recently by the Bureau of Statistics (BBS), he differed with the projection saying that the yield in potato, boro rice and maize would be higher in the outgoing year than the previous year.
Muhith said potato production would be about 10 percent more than the last year and is expected to total 88 lakh metric tons. Boro yield is also expected to be higher than last year while the production of maize would be substantially higher to around 22 lakh metric tons.
The government in the national budget set to achieve 7.2 per cent GDP growth in the current fiscal (2012-13) in a bid to become a middle-income country by 2021.
Earlier, the World Bank in its latest development outlook has downsized the Bangladesh’s GDP growth prospect to 5.8 percent, slashing 1.4 percentage points from the government’s 7.2 per cent target in the current fiscal (2012-13).
Another multilateral donor –Asian Development Bank — also forecast last month the country’s economic growth as 5.7 per cent in the current fiscal, down 1.50 percentage points from the government estimation of 7.2 percent.
Bangladesh’s GDP growth started to fall since 2011-12 after an impressive performance in 2010-11 when the country’s economy expanded at a rate of 6.71 per cent.
