BD has ability to overcome economic challenges: DCCI president

Our economy is facing few challenges like inflation, NPL, forex reserve, financial market volatility, balance of payment, and depreciation of taka, but Bangladesh has the experience of facing such challenges as well as overcoming all of these. As in the past, Bangladesh had the ability to overcome these economic challenges fast, said Ashraf Ahmed, President of Dhaka Chamber of Commerce & Industry (DCCI) at a press conference organized by DCCI on Saturday.

The DCCI president agreed that inflation, foreign exchange reserve, NPL, liquidity, etc. were some of the key challenges of the economy "but these challenges are not new to us. We have faced these types of challenges earlier and we could manage to overcome those."

Regarding energy crisis, he said that closure of manufacturing industries due to lack of power and energy was very expensive and had a negative impact on economic capacity, no doubt. As a business organization, "we want this crisis to be solved as soon as possible, he said. There is a scope of improvement in data transparency of BBS and all others", he added.

Earlier, he made a power-point presentation on the contemporary economic overview and shared the view of the Chamber with the media.

Regarding economic challenges he said that both the private sector, the growth engine of the economy, and the public sector were trying to face the challenges.

However, the private sector was required to play pivotal role in this year to bring the economy back to the trend of growth stability. For creating future smart Bangladesh, technology transfer and capacity building of CMSMEs through digital engagement was needed.

For the development of import substitute industries, he suggested expanding access to finance for CMSMEs and industrial startups through dedicated credit lines, loan guarantees and venture capital initiatives.

He said export diversification, export factoring, inter-bank foreign currency exchange and more incentivising the remittance inflow may increase forex reserve.

Implementation of the new monetary policy is expected to stabilize macroeconomy. This should help relieve inflationary pressure, stabilize reserves and improve balance of payments imbalances.

He said, "we need to keep pushing for inclusive growth, diversify the export base and focus on policies that help growth."

He also urged synchronization of accounting and reporting process with the tax code. He also said that a long-term and time-bound sector-specific national investment roadmap for major industries like Agriculture, Pharmaceuticals, Electronics, Light-engineering, IT & ITES and RMG industry was needed to boost private investment.

DCCI Senior Vice President Malik Talha Ismail Bari, Vice President Md. JunaedIbna Ali and members of the Board of Directors were present during the event.