Business Desk :
The lack of reliable data on poverty, employment and other key economic indicators in Bangladesh undermines the country’s efforts to make proactive contributions towards its development, according to speakers at a webinar.
For example, the National Household Database was meant to help streamline the beneficiary selection process for social safety net programmes by gathering socioeconomic data on each household.
The initiative was initially taken up by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) in collaboration with the Department of Disaster Management (DDM) in 2013.
The Tk 328 crore project financed by the government and the World Bank was supposed to be complete by 2017 but ultimately saw its deadline pushed back to June 2021, and costs balloon to Tk 727 crore.
After taking four years only to work out the modes of operation, the BBS collected socioeconomic information on 3.5 crore households from 64 districts in three phases in 2017 and 2018.
Still though, the database remains incomplete, bringing its relevance into question as the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has rendered these statistics obsolete in the face of dynamic economic changes brought on by Covid-19.
These comments came at a webinar styled, “COVID-19 Stimulus Packages: An Analysis of Institutional Capacity, Transparency, and Accountability”, organised by The Asia Foundation, Research and Policy Integration for Development (RAPID) and Economic Reporters Forum.
Pointing to how the lack of proper data can thwart any good initiative, speakers said that 50 lakh people were supposed to receive Tk 2,500 per head through mobile financial services to help ride out the crisis.
However, irregularities were detected in the selection of beneficiaries and as a result, the proceedings were suspended, they added.
In addition, the government had announced 28 stimulus packages from March 2020 to December 2021 for various industrial and service sectors to address the coronavirus fallout.
The packages involved a total of Tk 187,679 crore, or about 6.2 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product.
Bangladesh’s allocation was less compared to other countries in the Asia Pacific region but even so, the implementation of many packages was slow.
“I agree that there is a lack of reliable information and so, we are working sincerely to ensure that the right information is available at the right time,” said Planning Minister Ma Mannan.
In any emergency situation, the enactment of rapid prevention and recovery measures is crucial, and that is exactly what the government did amid the ongoing coronavirus crisis.
“Of course stimulus funds were disbursed through the banking sector, as was the case in many countries,” he said.
And although there may have been difficulties in identifying actual beneficiaries at first, the issues were later resolved, the planning minister added.
Mannan went on to say that despite some mistakes in implementing the stimulus funds, the initiative was much appreciated both at home and abroad.
“In a study by the International Monetary Fund, we are number one when it comes to coping with Covid-19. Maybe it was an opportunity to do better but we did well overall,” he said.
Mohammad Abdur Razzaque, chairman of RAPID and director of the Policy Research Institute, said organised groups secured more benefits from the incentive package.
This is especially true for export oriented sectors that can easily reach the ears of local policymakers.
As such, informal micro, small-and-medium enterprises had little to no access to stimulus funds while it is altogether too late for incentives to reach the struggling tourism sector.
Md Khairuzzaman Mozumder, additional secretary of the Finance Division, said excluding some new programs, 82 per cent of the incentive package had been implemented till November last year.
“We have seen in one of our studies that 6.79 crore people have benefited from the package while 1 lakh enterprises have benefited,” he added.
Md kawser Ahmed, member (secretary) of the planning ministry’s General Economic Division, said they will prepare the National Housing Database within this year.
