The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has revised Bangladesh's GDP-growth projection down to 4.5 per cent for the current fiscal year on account higher inflationary pressure on the economy.
Earlier in April this year, it projected that the GDP growth of Bangladesh would be 6.6 percent.
The IMF has made the projection in the October version of its flagship report titled "World Economic Outlook " made available Tuesday ahead of the annual general meeting of the World Bank and the IMF to be held in Washington.
The World Bank projected a 4.0-percent GDP growth for the fiscal year 2024-25 in Bangladesh in its report titled Bangladesh Development Update unveiled on October 15.
The government has set a target of 6.75-percent GDP growth for the current fiscal year. The growth projections made by the IMF and the World Bank are significantly lower than the government target.
The economy achieved a 5.82-percent growth in the last fiscal year according to the provisional estimate of the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS).
The IMF projected 9.97-percent inflation in Bangladesh for the current fiscal year, 3.97- percentage points higher than the April projection of 6.0 percent.
The report reveals that the economy of Bangladesh observed 9.97-percent inflation in the last fiscal year and it will remain same in the current fiscal.
Average inflation in the last fiscal year was 9.97 per cent in Bangladesh and the point-to-point inflation in July reached 11.89 per cent-the highest in a decade.
However, the average moving average inflation of last 12 months reached 9.97 percent in September, according to the BBS.
The global growth is expected to remain stable. However, notable revisions had taken place beneath the surface since April 2024, with upgrades to the forecast for the United States offsetting downgrades to those for other advanced economies, in particular, the largest European countries, reveals the report.
In emerging-market and developing economies, disruptions to production and shipping of commodities-especially oil-conflicts, civil unrest, and extreme weather events have led to downward revisions to the outlook for the Middle East and Central Asia and that for sub-Saharan Africa, it added further.
"Services-price inflation remains elevated in many regions, pointing to the importance of understanding sectoral dynamics and of calibrating monetary policy accordingly, as global disinflation continues," says the IMF.
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