100.22 million people faced high risk of economic and health vulnerabilities was the finding of a study titled ‘COVID-19 and national budget 2020-2021: Rethinking strategy for the bottom of the pyramid’ which was revealed at a digitally organised press conference on Monday.
The average family income loss between March and May stood at about 74 per cent, while over 1.4 million migrant workers had returned or were on their way back home due to job loss. The study findings showed that among the people at high risk of economic and health vulnerabilities, 53.64 million were extreme poor, including those pushed down to extreme poverty by the pandemic. While 47.33 million extreme poor faced high economic risk, 36.33 million were at high health risk.
Policymakers have to synchronise and sequence a whole set of novel supply side interventions with conventional demand management policies to tackle the macroeconomic problems which we are currently facing. Assessing the supply and demand response to different regimes of reopening and expansionary monetary and fiscal policies is crucial to determining the economy’s trajectory.
We have a government that does not take the experts seriously. We have reminded our readers many times that the government does not believe in listening to others. It is now clear that the health system was so neglected that it cannot be put together to face the crisis. More people are infected, and more people are dying. We are living with a public health crisis. It is doubtful that even with the experience of failures anything has been learnt. The government is unable to show competence. It has become difficult to get treatment in hospitals for other diseases for fear of infection. The government is in a broken condition and it cannot do anything about. We are in a logjam.
The much harder reality lies ahead. That is the economic crisis getting worse. Perhaps ours is the least active government and most unprepared to be helpful. The sole nation is frustrated. It is not realised that public support and public accountability is vital for people’s trust in the government. The government has not been able to work together with others. So many people die from coronavirus most helplessly.
So we are totally unprepared for the financial condition to be more threatening. A large number of people suffer hunger and die. Our fear is that they will not die quietly leaving us in peace. There will be larger violence and looting. The post COVID scenario for Bangladesh proves more challenging than the present ones.
