Staff Reporter:
A delegation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been satisfied with the progress of imple-menting the terms given to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS).
The IMF team expressed this satisfaction in a meeting with the BBS held on Tuesday at the BBS office in Agargaon in the capital.
In the meeting, the IMF wants to know the updated data on inflation (Consumer Price Index), GDP (Gross Domestic Product), and quarterly GDP data instead of the traditional method.
The BBS informed IMF about these issues in the meeting. The IMF delegation also sought consistent data on Bangladesh’s growth in the last 50 years since independence, sources said.
BBS DG Motiar Rahman told that the IMF wanted to know progress of moving to a new method of inflation.
“The way we calculate inflation is no longer doing it this way, it is changing. Around 95 percent of countries measure inflation using the IMF’s Mixed Method, Bangladesh will follow the new method,” he said.
In the new price inflation, food items will be 263 instead of 153. 720 products. They (IMF team) ex-pressed satisfaction knowing the progress of the matters, the BBS DG said.
Almost every country in the world publishes their GDP figures on a quarterly basis. Bangladesh does it once a year. There are also examples in the country of taking one and a half to two years to reveal the real GDP if it is on the downward side. Again, the work that BBS is supposed to do is often done by the Ministry of Finance.
Regarding the quarterly GDP, Motiar said that the government will publish the data on GDP four times a year. But it will start from 2024 calendar year. The work on the data has progressed, he said.
