Staff Reporter :Dr AB Mirza Azizul Islam, former finance adviser of the caretaker government, in his instant reaction on the proposed budget said that the budget lacks economic reality of the country and key macro targets set in it are mostly unachievable.He was skeptical about the implementation of the development budget as the government was struggling to bring dynamism in the concerned agencies entrusted with budget implementation.”It is quite challenging to implement the budget as it is over ambitious,” said Dr AB Mirza Azizul Islam.He added: The key macro targets, including revenue, GDP, ADP implementation, set at the budget are not achievable given the present economic conditions. “The government has projected a higher revenue collection target for the next fiscal year which will be a challenging task for it. It is totally impossible to realize such an ambitious revenue when the tax base is low and NBR lacks of dynamism to achieve the target,” he added. According to the budget documents, the revenue collection target for the FY 17 has been estimated at Tk 2,42,752 crore which is 35.4 per cent higher than that of the present fiscal year.Of the total projected revenue receipts, Tk 2,03,152 crore will be collected by National Board of Revenue (NBR), while Tk 32,350 crore will come as non-tax revenues and the rest Tk 7,250 crore from non-NBR collection.Mirza Azizul Islam the said the upcoming budget has also set ambitious spending plan which will largely depend on the government’s ability to mobilise foreign fund, strengthen the revenue collection and capacity to spend capital. The upcoming budget has been allocated Tk1,10,700 crore under Annual Development Programme (ADP) is mostly unrealistic given the present capacity of the government agencies.Poor implementation capacity of the concerned agencies is forcing the government to downsize the ADP every year and it was also happened in the outgoing fiscal. The ADP was revised with an outlay of over Tk93,000 crore from the original Tk97,000 crore.”The budgetary allocation in the next fiscal’s ADP goes up to nearly Tk 30,000 crore without bringing any structural reform or capacity building of the implementing agencies. So, it is easy to predict that the ADP implementation scenario in the next fiscal,” he added. When asked, Mirza Aziz said, in case of shortfall in external financing may force the government to dependent heavily on bank borrowing to finance deficit budget. This may not be a problem for the government when banks have been maintaining a higher liquidity. But the worrying thing would be its internal borrowing from costly saving instruments. This may put the government to further debt burden, he noted.
