The budget for FY23 is to be announced today and, given that our economy has now seen through two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, it will need to be focused on not just bringing the economy up to speed but to help it go beyond.
To echo Debapriya Bhattacharya of the Centre for Policy Development, the main way the budget can carry that out is by zeroing in on job creation. An unprecedented level of unemployment was one of the biggest ways that Covid-19 impacted our nation, which caused innumerable redundancies in various industries throughout Bangladesh.
Definitive goals and targets which seek to generate employment will be nothing short of imperative on that front.
Given that the nation is also currently in the middle of severe inflation, with the price of commodities reaching ever higher -- while the purchasing power of the average individual has decreased to the point of it impacting their savings -- the budget absolutely needs to plan out a way to reduce it.
While Bangladesh’s GDP growth has reached impressive levels over the last few years, for the budget this year to prioritize the employment over GDP growth would not be ill-advised. In that sense, the budget for FY23 needs to undo most, if not all, of the damage that the last two years of weathering the Covid-19 pandemic has dealt on our economy.
Bangladesh has thankfully done much better than other, more well-off nations in retaining the integrity of its economy from the ravaging effects of a worldwide pandemic. The upcoming budget needs to be more remedial in nature, but not at the cost of losing focus of the bigger picture.
