Budgetary exercise and the perennial syndrome
Thursday, 14 June 2007
Syed Fattahul Alim
WHILE offering critical as well as appreciative opinions over various aspects of the proposed budget will continue for sometime, the life of the average person will not remain frozen in time in the meanwhile. They will have to till the fields, work in the mills, and trundle along with the load of life. Duty or no duty, the prices of some of the necessaries of life will still go up however much the leaders of the apex business bodies may curse them.
Some of the business leaders have even recommended harsh punishment for the operators in the kitchen market who have irrationally pushed up the prices of some essential items. A member of the civil society even wondered aloud with a note of resignation about the erratic behaviour of the essentials market with these words: 'It is understandable that prices have gone up for items on which fresh import duties have been imposed; but then why is it that the opposite has not happened in the case of items from which previously existing duties have been withdrawn?'
Though it is a matter of interest as well as curiosity for individuals with an intellectual bent of mind, the man in the street have no time to afford the luxury of a dispassionate look at things. They are already blasé about the absurdities of the market so much so that they have learnt to take it as a cruel fact of life. Like politics, many other things in this land verge on the ridiculous and the absurd! Members of the intelligentsia, political leaders and activists here are very fond of talking endlessly about their revolutionary past and their heroic exploits manifested through uncompromising popular struggles against all varieties of past injustices and political autocracies. Does it not sound strange that the same people have forgotten to lift a finger against such atrocities being inflicted on them by the kitchen market operators year after year? Where has gone the revolutionary spirit of their past?
However that may be, the various stakeholders in the business, industry, the academia and the civil society at large are ritually giving vent to their views on the budget. And the usual furore over any government's recurrently exercised practice of declaring annual budget about how it will plan its next financial year's expenditure from what it expects to collect partly from the domestic economy and partly as aid from foreign sources does hardly ever reflect the view of the mass people. The reason is the budget-making process in practice does not need the real people's opinion about it, though everything done goes by the name of the people.
Even before the incumbent caretaker government took office, the politicians outside previous governments, who remained forever obsessed with movements to overthrow the government in office, did obviously dismiss the latter's annual budget-making exercise out of hand as something that merited no serious attention, or study. They grew the habit of dismissing any budget without a second thought, saying it was anti-people, or one designed to kill the poor. Some political leaders, who still afford to use that kind of rhetoric, have meanwhile used it to make sweeping evaluation of the just announced budget.
That is about the politically motivated comments on budgets serving only the political constituencies of the commentators concerned. In the case of criticisms by trade bodies or other stakeholders of the economy, it is the self-interest of the sectors each of them represent.
The entire exercise of criticising or appreciating the budget is said to be done as part of democratic political practice. And whether the opinions about the work of the incumbent government are sweeping or studied, they are always thought to be a welcome intellectual input from the enlightened members of a modern society. That notwithstanding, the business of governance, framing of laws and preparation of budgets go as usual. The real losers in this set intellectual game are the people.
In the case of the just proposed budget by the finance adviser, every sector of society where the actors are big stakeholders and powerful and have their own associations, syndicates and brotherhood have been voicing their opinions. But the common people have no such elitist company like the business community, professional groups or consumer bodies to voice their feelings or views about the budget. Moreover, they do not have the specialist knowledge to analyse the budget critically. Small wonder, as they are non-experts or without the power derived from associations or syndicates, they are eventually the worst affected party after each and every budget passed by the governments since the dawn of the era whence the practice started. Ideally, the appropriate voice of the common people in response to the budget should have been their elected representatives in parliament. Unfortunately, so far their acknowledged representatives remained too biased and uncritical either as supporters or as detractors so much so that the average person is perpetually in the dark about what the new balance sheet of the government for a particular year is and how it is going to dip into their purse.
Some research and non-government bodies have even talked about participatory budgets. But how that can be done in practice by involving common people is anybody's guess, if that is not a populist slogan only to catch cheap attention of the general audience. All this does not help the people affected by the budget either living in the cities or in the rural areas.
In the present case, the budget-makers have withdrawn duties on a good number of imported essentials. Understandably, the move is intended to reduce the financial pressure of the consumers who buy their essentials from the Kitchen market. But will this move actually allow the traders importing the items to reap financial benefit more than the consumers who buy goods for them from the kitchen markets? Until the government and the consuming public are able to discipline the unscrupulous market operators either through legal measures where feasible, or by way of creating countervailing market mechanisms to reach the commodities to the average person, the new importation regime may not bear the intended fruit. In a similar fashion, the intermediaries may gobble up the promised subsidies on the agricultural inputs.
The huge budget of about Tk 871 billion with a target of 7 per cent growth is highly anticipatory so far as the government's income is concerned. The huge budget will necessarily leave its inflationary pressure on the economy. The existing contractionary monetary policy will only offset some of the monetary impacts of the budget by diminishing the expected target of growth. Enhanced duty on the imported industrial raw materials will affect the indigenous industries.
These are but the perennial syndromes of budgets in a low-income economy. Under the circumstances, there is no cut and dried solution to this perpetual syndrome, a legacy handed down from the past.
WHILE offering critical as well as appreciative opinions over various aspects of the proposed budget will continue for sometime, the life of the average person will not remain frozen in time in the meanwhile. They will have to till the fields, work in the mills, and trundle along with the load of life. Duty or no duty, the prices of some of the necessaries of life will still go up however much the leaders of the apex business bodies may curse them.
Some of the business leaders have even recommended harsh punishment for the operators in the kitchen market who have irrationally pushed up the prices of some essential items. A member of the civil society even wondered aloud with a note of resignation about the erratic behaviour of the essentials market with these words: 'It is understandable that prices have gone up for items on which fresh import duties have been imposed; but then why is it that the opposite has not happened in the case of items from which previously existing duties have been withdrawn?'
Though it is a matter of interest as well as curiosity for individuals with an intellectual bent of mind, the man in the street have no time to afford the luxury of a dispassionate look at things. They are already blasé about the absurdities of the market so much so that they have learnt to take it as a cruel fact of life. Like politics, many other things in this land verge on the ridiculous and the absurd! Members of the intelligentsia, political leaders and activists here are very fond of talking endlessly about their revolutionary past and their heroic exploits manifested through uncompromising popular struggles against all varieties of past injustices and political autocracies. Does it not sound strange that the same people have forgotten to lift a finger against such atrocities being inflicted on them by the kitchen market operators year after year? Where has gone the revolutionary spirit of their past?
However that may be, the various stakeholders in the business, industry, the academia and the civil society at large are ritually giving vent to their views on the budget. And the usual furore over any government's recurrently exercised practice of declaring annual budget about how it will plan its next financial year's expenditure from what it expects to collect partly from the domestic economy and partly as aid from foreign sources does hardly ever reflect the view of the mass people. The reason is the budget-making process in practice does not need the real people's opinion about it, though everything done goes by the name of the people.
Even before the incumbent caretaker government took office, the politicians outside previous governments, who remained forever obsessed with movements to overthrow the government in office, did obviously dismiss the latter's annual budget-making exercise out of hand as something that merited no serious attention, or study. They grew the habit of dismissing any budget without a second thought, saying it was anti-people, or one designed to kill the poor. Some political leaders, who still afford to use that kind of rhetoric, have meanwhile used it to make sweeping evaluation of the just announced budget.
That is about the politically motivated comments on budgets serving only the political constituencies of the commentators concerned. In the case of criticisms by trade bodies or other stakeholders of the economy, it is the self-interest of the sectors each of them represent.
The entire exercise of criticising or appreciating the budget is said to be done as part of democratic political practice. And whether the opinions about the work of the incumbent government are sweeping or studied, they are always thought to be a welcome intellectual input from the enlightened members of a modern society. That notwithstanding, the business of governance, framing of laws and preparation of budgets go as usual. The real losers in this set intellectual game are the people.
In the case of the just proposed budget by the finance adviser, every sector of society where the actors are big stakeholders and powerful and have their own associations, syndicates and brotherhood have been voicing their opinions. But the common people have no such elitist company like the business community, professional groups or consumer bodies to voice their feelings or views about the budget. Moreover, they do not have the specialist knowledge to analyse the budget critically. Small wonder, as they are non-experts or without the power derived from associations or syndicates, they are eventually the worst affected party after each and every budget passed by the governments since the dawn of the era whence the practice started. Ideally, the appropriate voice of the common people in response to the budget should have been their elected representatives in parliament. Unfortunately, so far their acknowledged representatives remained too biased and uncritical either as supporters or as detractors so much so that the average person is perpetually in the dark about what the new balance sheet of the government for a particular year is and how it is going to dip into their purse.
Some research and non-government bodies have even talked about participatory budgets. But how that can be done in practice by involving common people is anybody's guess, if that is not a populist slogan only to catch cheap attention of the general audience. All this does not help the people affected by the budget either living in the cities or in the rural areas.
In the present case, the budget-makers have withdrawn duties on a good number of imported essentials. Understandably, the move is intended to reduce the financial pressure of the consumers who buy their essentials from the Kitchen market. But will this move actually allow the traders importing the items to reap financial benefit more than the consumers who buy goods for them from the kitchen markets? Until the government and the consuming public are able to discipline the unscrupulous market operators either through legal measures where feasible, or by way of creating countervailing market mechanisms to reach the commodities to the average person, the new importation regime may not bear the intended fruit. In a similar fashion, the intermediaries may gobble up the promised subsidies on the agricultural inputs.
The huge budget of about Tk 871 billion with a target of 7 per cent growth is highly anticipatory so far as the government's income is concerned. The huge budget will necessarily leave its inflationary pressure on the economy. The existing contractionary monetary policy will only offset some of the monetary impacts of the budget by diminishing the expected target of growth. Enhanced duty on the imported industrial raw materials will affect the indigenous industries.
These are but the perennial syndromes of budgets in a low-income economy. Under the circumstances, there is no cut and dried solution to this perpetual syndrome, a legacy handed down from the past.