NEWS reports said Planning Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal on Wednesday said that the GDP growth in the current fiscal 2014-15 remained almost uninterrupted through the January-March political violence and blockades. He said the economy grew at 6.5 percent during the last nine months which also includes the peak months of trouble and that the growth would continue to rise, however, at around a 7 percent rate. In his view the last three months violence had only a minimal impact on growth. The Minister cited economic data compiled by Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) and said the loss estimates made by different organizations were ‘not accurate.’ He also contradicted the World Bank growth forecast of 5.6 percent and disowned its estimate of economic losses for Bangladesh at 1 percent of the GDP or CPD’s loss estimate of 0.55 percent. He said it was only around 0.1 percent and differed with the WB comment that ‘political turmoil is taking a heavy toll’ by keeping the growth rates at 5.6 percent. Such forecasts are highly at variance with the Finance Minister’s claim that the GDP will hit the 7 percent target.
The Minister used BBS data to support his claim which said ‘no economic activities such as production in factories, in agriculture, export and communication remained closed during the months though it became a little bit costly and got disrupted.’ But it is easy to guess that BBS can produce data as the government wishes. The Minister’s new claims even disown the economic loss estimates worked out by the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FBCCI) or the Center for Policy Dialogue (CPD). It seems to many that he is producing the little impact outlook to prove that the government has managed the economy well to leave the growth scenario almost unaffected through the long time crisis, although BBS data even do not include figures from the February to March period. It is also noticeable that the Planning Minister’s claims are in variance with the Finance Minister’s outcry on economic losses and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s claim in Parliament that the loss to the economy stands at Tk 1.20 lakh crore due to the unrest.
Hearing the Planning Minister’s high profile growth outlook, most people now may tend to wonder what is right and what is wrong. If the economic losses were so minimal so as to leave the growth prospects unimpaired, then what the entire nation saw and experienced through the long violence days were mostly illusion. The WB may be even wrong but what about the loss estimates of other global organizations like the ADB, IMF or local bodies on the impact of the long time violence on the economy.
In fact we don’t know what the Planning Minister wanted to highlight this time by poorly showing the economic losses while the government organisations produced highly inflated figures of economic losses earlier.
