Business Desk :
The current inflationary pressures have eroded the real income and adversely affected the food security and essential expenditures of the low-income households in Bangladesh.
This has also significantly disrupted their economic recovery from the Covid-19 shock, says a latest survey.
In a virtual press conference on Sunday, titled “Inflation, Coping, and Recovery Challenges” Dr Hossain Zillur Rahman, executive chairman of Power and Participation Research Centre (PPRC), and Dr Imran Matin, executive director of BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), highlighted these trends.
They presented these findings from the latest round of a survey in a joint PPRC-BIGD study, which has been capturing, since April 2020, the evolving economic crisis among low-income communities in Bangladesh due to Covid-19 through multiple rounds of surveys among a large sample of urban slum and rural population.
Almost 4,000 households were surveyed in the fifth round conducted in May this year, according to the survey.
They show that per capita daily incomes were steadily recovering after the second lockdown-which increased by a 27 per cent from August 2021 to January 2022- but has started reversing again by a 6 per cent between January and May 2022 due to inflation, disrupting the expected recovery of real incomes to that of pre-pandemic times.
Dr Rahman said inflation has compounded the Covid-induced disruptions to economic recovery, with real incomes of poorer households still 15 per cent below pre-Covid levels two years from the onset of the pandemic.
The recent fall in daily per capita real incomes in the urban slums (8 per cent) has been sharper than that in the rural areas (3 per cent).
Livelihoods in urban slums were already more severely affected by Covid and recovering more slowly, compared to those in villages.
The inflation has further slowed the recovery in the slums, according to the survey.
The inflationary pressure also appears to have pulled more women to find work; 40 per cent of female respondents in the survey were engaged in income-generating activities in January, which jumped to 52 per cent in May.
Because of rising prices, most of the surveyed households have drastically reduced or stopped the consumption of major food items such as fish, meat, milk, and fruit, since February, according to the survey findings.
As of May, one in five urban slum households had also skipped at least one meal in the last month due to a lack of money.
Compared to August 2021, more households were depending on their own incomes and production for their food needs in May 2022, as opposed to loans, dues from shops, and help from relatives, according to the survey.
This seems to be a positive development. However, 38 per cent of the households also said they needed to borrow more money but could not, mostly because of reasons like inability to repay or existing large debt burdens, indicating that many of these households are under severe financial stress.
