The government is preparing the seventh five-year plan with the highest priority on employment generation to accelerate the economic growth rate and achieve the 10% mark.
Officials said the government also aimed at increasing the per capita income in both urban and rural areas by 2021.
The Planning Commission is preparing the five-year economic development guidelines from the next financial year (2015-16) and the work for the seventh five-year plan will end in January next year.
From August, the government started to take opinions of economists, academics, entrepreneurs, journalists and other stakeholders on the seventh five-year plan.
According to the preparation work by the General Economic Division (GED), the plan will have a comprehensive policy on boosting investment for creating employment generation.
Sources said five areas – increasing electricity production, ensuring energy security, addressing infrastructure constraints, developing the ICT sector, and tackling climate change – would also get importance in the new plan.
It would also concentrate on the strategy for strengthening regional economic cooperation among South Asian countries and South-East Asian countries, the sources said.
“As the country’s economy remained stagnant at around 6% over the past two decades, investment-led growth should be the priority for the next five-year economic development plan to get out of this cycle,” said Zaid Bakht, director of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies.
Without raising private investment, the economic growth would be fragile, as it was a driving force for sustainable and quality economic growth, he said, adding that to woo such investment, the country must remove infrastructure bottlenecks.
General Economic Division member Dr Shamsul Alam said massive changes would be brought in the socio-economic development in the seventh five-year plan.
“We are preparing the plan based on the lessons from the fifth five-year plan,” he said. “The plan might have a target of raising the GDP to 10% with priority to employment generation growth by 2021.”
The plan would be assessed mid-stage to influence the direction of the next plan, he said.
A panel of economist, headed by economist Dr Wahiduddin Mahmud, was formed in August to give necessary guidelines for formulating the draft document of the seventh plan.
The plan will be formulated adopting 28 agendas, including economic development, employment generation, ensuring electricity and energy security, developing the education and health sectors, increasing agriculture production, developing capital market, equally developing rural areas and cities, and strengthening local government, sources said.
In its first meeting recently, the National Steering Committee that was formed to make a draft proposal of the plan, underscored the need for the country’s industrialisation through enhancing productivity, skilled manpower with imparting education for earnings more remittances.
Bangladesh gets $14.2 billion in remittances from some 8.6 million expatriates whereas only 3.2 million Philippine expatriates send some $31bn remittances to their country. The difference is due to the shortage of skilled manpower and education, according to the General Economic Division.
The theme of the seventh five-year plan is “Accelerating Growth: Empowering Every Citizen.”
China and India both continue to use five-year plan, accelerating their economic growth.
The mid-term review of the sixth five-year plan, conducted by the Planning Commission, showed that the performance has been a mixed-bag, with more successes than failures.
In 1973, the first five-year plan was formulated aiming at creating and sustaining a framework wherein people of the country could prosper in freedom, basic needs of common people could be met, and everyone could cherish the ideals and values of a free society.
