Is the government smart enough to pilot our flight in that direction and by maintaining that altitude? Economists know that achieving this would require double-digit growth for the next 17 years in a row. Becoming a developed country by 2041 is an ambitious political goal, and a smart accountant wouldn't echo it without understanding how high growth targets must be set for the subsequent budgets. Some desperate numbers in the budget may taste sweet to accountants, but sensible economists would not have gone for these figures, which lack a sense of feasibility. Read more Three perils unaddressed in the new budget The budget 2023-24 thus seems to serve their greed. Keeping the interest rate cap at nine percent is being posed as an accounting necessity at a time when inflation is more than nine percent, so that business tycoons can draw funds from banks at effectively a zero real rate of interest. But our central bank was instructed not to alter the cap. The US central bank raised its interest rate 10 times in the last 14 months, while neighbouring India followed suit at least five times within the same duration. The finance ministry still justifies the interest rate cap at nine percent, making any sense of economics sour – as if the government has unearthed a neo-modern theory of inflation management which no other country on the globe has been able to adopt. That is why the budget seriously lacks effective tools of lowering inflation. No doctor can treat a patient efficiently if a faulty thermometer displays inaccurate readings of temperature. This would provide a real reference scenario for policymaking, rather than settling on a sugar-coated number such as 8 or 9 percent using the old-style barometer of the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS). The time has come for the government to build a separate basket for the struggling poor and measure inflation for them every month. If we choose only 10 commodities – which low-income people and hand-to-mouth workers consume regularly – and measure inflation, the figure will land at no less than 20 percent.
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