Shakhawat Hossain
A special meeting to be held in the ministry of finance (MoF) next week will review the escalating inflation that has emerged as a major sore point of the country's macro-economic management, sources said.
An additional secretary of the MoF will preside over the meeting which has been convened in the backdrop of rising food and commodity prices.
The meeting will take stock of the latest inflationary trend and suggest measures to contain the soaring inflation.
The date of the meeting has been tentatively fixed on November 15 after the higher authority of the government instructed the MoF to come up with suggestions for reversing the trend, sources added.
There has been a debate over the rate of inflation on the annual basis for the current fiscal.
While the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is projecting 9.0 per cent annual inflation, the Bangladesh Bank says the inflation would be around 8.5 per cent.
The point-to-point inflation hit 10.1 per cent in the month of July due to steep rise in the prices of food items. It rose further in the following month before coming down to 9.6 per cent in September this year.
The central bank and the national board of revenue (NBR) has already started joint monitoring the prices of about 16 imported essential items.
The officials of the MoF said the cost of imported items including wheat, edible oil, lentil, power milk, onion, and sugar increased has substantially due to rise in the prices of the same in the international market.
According to the revenue board data, the import cost of some 1.5 million tonnes of wheat was Tk 14.08 billion in 2003-04 fiscal. But the import cost of some 1.6 million tonnes wheat stood at Tk 25.61 billion at the end of the last fiscal.
Like wheat, local importers are spending more on the import of other food items, the officials added.
Spl meeting on inflation likely next week
FE Team | Published: November 05, 2007 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00
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