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'GDP growth to exceed donors' estimates'

UNB, Dhaka
Finance and Planning Minister M Saifur Rahman yesterday claimed the country's real GDP growth would be more than "the understated estimates by different quarters" including the development partners.
Asian Development Bank (ADB) has projected this year's Gross Domestic Products (GDP) of Bangladesh to grow by 5.3 percent and International Monetary Fund
(IMF) by 5.4 percent, scaling down their earlier estimates due to crop losses in recurrent floods and increased petroleum prices.
"Our development is very much understated... many emerging areas were not taken into account in calculating the GDP," Saifur said at a statistical conference in the National Economic Council conference room, expressing his dissatisfaction over lack of updated data.
"This year's GDP will depend on
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the Boro harvest," he told the inaugural function of the ninth National Statistical Conference styled 'Statistics: Key to Monitoring National Progress'.
Bangladesh Statistical Association (BSA) has organised the two-day conference to present some 37 papers portraying the country's socioeconomic condition, problems and prospects.
Speaking at the function, Agriculture Minister MK Anwar mentioned lack of co-ordination between the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) and the government agencies concerned, including ministries.
BSA President Prof Quazi Mafizur Rahman and Secretary General Abdur Rashid Sikdar, former secretary AKM Ghulam Rabbani and United Nations Family Planning Association (UNFPA) Country Representative Suneeta Mukherjee also spoke at the function.
The finance minister said he found visible signs of progress as he travelled across the country to see the newly developed industrial establishments beside the highways, in and around the capital and other cities, including Chittagong.
"Statistics has to be realistic, it should not be politically motivated," Saifur said, referring to the claim by the previous government that the country had become self-sufficient in food production.
"We're not importing some three lakh tons of rice and wheat a year to export those again," he said, expressing disappointment over the then statistics on food production supplied by the BBS.
He asked the BBS to strengthen its activities at the field level to have correct and relevant statistics to guide the national planning properly.
The minister also stressed the need for revising the statistical base to bring new and emerging areas into the national accounts, aimed at having a more realistic GDP based on the changed economic situation.
After the conference, Saifur told reporters he would sit today (Saturday) to review the progress in formation of two committees as decided earlier to re-base the GDP estimation.
An expert-level consultation at end-February on Revision and Rebasing of GDP decided to form the two committees for redesigning the barometer of country's economic health.
One of the two is an executive body with representation from organisations like the Planning Commission, the BBS and the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS), and the other is a supervisory committee comprising senior economists like Prof Wahiduddin Mahmud.
Officials said the idea of redesigning the base emerged against the backdrop of the changed production and consumption patterns and emergence of new areas like construction, food industry, restaurants, leasing companies and stock exchanges.
BBS compiles GDP along with other macro-economic indicators taking 1995-96 as the base year.