ICC Bangladesh endorses avoiding hard loans, cutting luxury goods’ import

ICC Bangladesh endorses avoiding hard loans, cutting luxury goods’ import

ICC Bangladesh strongly endorsed the finance ministry’s recent recommendation to avoid hard loans and discourage the import of luxury goods in order to reduce pressure on declining foreign exchange reserves.
The leading chamber also endorsed the recent austerity and regulatory measures taken by the government and Bangladesh Bank aimed at curbing non-essential imports, suspending the implementation of projects with high import components.
“We believe this will send a positive signal to the market and the economy as well as curbing inflation,” ICCB President Mahbubur Rahman told the 27th annual council held in Dhaka on Saturday.
ICCB also supports the demand of the businesses not to increase the power and gas rates, fuel prices as well reduce the corporate rate taxes during the upcoming budget as these will be helpful in containing the inflation, the ICCB president said.
While presenting the ICCB’s report, he said that over the last two years, the pandemic has played a major role in shaping the global economy. Many sectors have found themselves in difficulty and are still struggling and the countries dependent on those sectors are now quietly trying to get back up again. The global economy is poised to be sent on yet another unpredictable course by Russia-Ukraine war. The Executive Board Report observed that the Russian invasion of Ukraine poses the most severe risk to developing Asia’s economic outlook, the report said.
The war is already affecting economies in the region through sharp increases in prices for commodities such as oil and has heightened instability in global financial markets, it said. The Covid-19 continues to impact many parts of developing Asia, with some economies experiencing new surges in cases, he said. Bangladesh’s journey of 50 years since its independence in 1971 has been tremendous and to many it is a ‘land of impossible attainment’, he added.
The dominant narrative of Bangladesh has been of an economic miracle and the country’s impressive score card is built on her success in terms of attaining a consistent high pace of economic growth and an impressive performance with regard to various development indicators, including those relating to the millennium development goals (MDGs), the ICCB president said.
According to World Economic Forum since its founding in 1971, Bangladesh has emerged from overwhelming poverty to be proclaimed by the World Bank in 2020 as ‘a model for poverty reduction’, Rahman said.
Bangladesh, like other countries, faces the daunting challenge of fully recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic, which has constrained economic activities and reversed some of the gains achieved in the last decade, he said.