The committee constituted for preparing the ‘White Paper on the State of Bangladesh Economy’ is focusing its work on a number of broader sectors to ensure a forensic examination of the state of the economy of the country, the committee chief Debapriya Bhattacharya said on Wednesday.
‘We are working to spot where the problems are and where the economy stands at the moment,’ said Debapriya while speaking at a discussion on fair finance in Bangladesh.
He said that the committee was examining non-performing loans, evasion of tax, illicit capital flow and corruption in the distribution of social welfare allowances.
The committee is also looking at revenue generation and foreign direct investment and how they were used and the impacts they had on the lives of ordinary people, explained Debapriya, also a distinguished fellow at the Centre for Policy Dialogue.
The committee earlier sought opinions from the public on issues such as credibility of government statistics, macro-economy challenges, growth in gross domestic product, inflation and its shocks, poverty, inequality, internal revenue mobilisation, fixing priorities on public expenditure, balance of foreign debt and its threshold, mega projects, actual picture of banking sector, the state of energy and power sector, business-environment and private sector investment, illegal money and its smuggling, youth employment and dynamics of the labour market, overseas job market and rights of the expatriates.
The discussion was organised in a city hotel to launch Fair Finance Bangladesh.
Fair Finance Bangladesh is the Bangladesh version of what started as Fair Finance International, a network of more than 100 civil society organisations coordinated by Oxfam Novid, in 2009. The initiative aimed at strengthening the commitment of banks and other financial institutions to social, environmental and human rights standards, according to the keynote paper presented at the discussion.
The discussion was organised by the Fair Finance Bangladesh, the Democratic Budget Movement, and the Participatory Research and Action Network.
Speakers at the program expressed their disappointment as Bangladesh lacked a fair finance policy aligning with global standards. Fair finance includes sustainable and green financing.
They said that the discussion on fair finance often remained limited to sustainable finance and renewable energy finance.
The speakers said that the fund created by the government as green finance and technological transfer was utterly insufficient.
About Tk 6,500 crore was allocated for transforming an industry worth Tk 20,000 crore, the speakers argued, pointing out that even the paltry allocation remained unused to a great extent every year.
The speakers stated that there was a serious lack of transparency with regard to foreign investment entering Bangladesh and getting used.
They renewed their call for authorities to follow the highest possible policy.
‘Promises in policies are good. The question is about their implementation,’ said Rayyan Hassan, executive director at NGO Forum on ADB.
The discussion, among others, was attended by professor Sharmind Neelormi, also a member of the white paper committee, City Bank PLC managing director Mashrur Arefin, Change Initiative’s chief executive M Zakir Hossain Khan, Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis lead analyst Shafiqul Alam, and PRAAN chief executive Nurul Alam Masud.