An International Monetary Fund mission will arrive in the capital next week to review targets, including the underachieved forex reserves, regarding its $4.7 billion loan programme.
The finance division officials said they are looking forward for a successful negotiation with the visiting IMF mission to release the next tranche of around $690 million by next June despite missing the forex reserves target slightly.
Between April 24 and May 8, the IMF mission will hold a series of meeting with officials of Bangladesh Bank, finance division and National Board of Revenue.
The officials said that all but one targets were fulfilled by the December 2023 deadline.
BB failed to keep the target on the net international reserves of $17.78 billion which was earlier revised from $26.8 billion.聽
BB maintained forex reserves at $17.20 billion at the end of December, facing a shortfall of around $58 million.
The other major quantitative performance indicator of the loan programme taken to overcome the ongoing dollar shortage has been the revenue collection.
NBR managed to collect taxes amounting to Tk聽1,65,630 crore in the July-December period of FY24, compared with the target Tk聽1,43,640 crore.
The revenue collection target was also revised downward by the IMF during their mission in the capital in October.
In October 2023, IMF had reviewed performance criteria under the loan programe for the first time.
BB and NBR failed to meet their respective targets by the deadline of June 2023.
The IMF, being convinced with reasons shown by the government for the failure, disbursed the first tranche in December 2023.
In January 2023, the IMF had released the opening tranche worth $476 million after the government agreed to carry out economic reforms.
The government sought the IMF loan to tackle the shortage of foreign currencies as well as downturns in the overall economic activities.
In the past one year under the programme period, improvement in different economic indicators has hardly been seen.
The government鈥檚 initial projection of 7.5 per cent GDP growth has already been revised down to 6.7 per cent, according to finance ministry officials.
However, data on growth by Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics raised doubts regarding achieving even the revised target.
The country鈥檚 growth in gross domestic product during the second quarter of the current financial year dropped considerably.
BBS recorded GDP growth for the period of October-December in FY24 at 3.78 per cent, compared with 7.08 per cent in the same period of FY23.
The average inflation rate of over 9 per cent for the past 21 months had negative impacts on demand.
