Business Report :
The present state of availability and accessibility of fiscal data do not adequately meet the demand for policymaking, according to a study of the Centre of Policy Dialogue (CPD).
Constituency-wise data is not available Impact analyses (both ex-ante and ex-post) of fiscal measures are mostly missing, decisions are often taken (on an ad-hoc basis) without stakeholder consultation, found the study.
Data on budgetary allocations and public expenditure (eg for social protection programmes) at the upazila/constituency level should be published so that MPs can make budgetary decisions and monitor implementation, said Towfiqul Islam Khan, a senior research fellow at Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD). He was presenting the study at dialogue on Challenges of Improving Fiscal Data for Policymaking in Bangladesh organised by the think tank in partnership with The Asia Foundation at a hotel in Dhaka on Thursday.
The demand side (data users viz policymakers, civil society, media, researchers, development partners etc) and supply-side (data generators and suppliers viz MoF, NBR, IMED, BB etc) of the fiscal data ecosystem will be evaluated based on four dimensions: availability, accessibility, agility and accuracy. Khan said the government should take an initiative to develop a comprehensive database that will provide long term data series in excel or any other easily
reproducible format.
