A United Nations report on Tuesday said that Bangladesh’s gross domestic product growth fell to 0.5 per cent in the calendar year 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bangladesh saw its economic growth down to 0.5 per cent in 2020 from 8.4 per cent in 2019, said the report titled the World Economic Situation and Prospects 2021, produced by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
The report, however, added that the fall of the fastest growing economy in the region was cushioned some what by a recovery in trade and remittances in the second half of the year.
In its annexure, the UN report mentioned that the GDP growth rate in Bangladesh was 4.3 per cent in the 2019–20 fiscal year and it was ‘partly estimated’.
The government-calculated GDP growth rate for 2019–20 was 5.2 per cent.
The UN also projects that the country’s GDP growth would be 5.1 per cent in the current 2020–21 fiscal year and 7.6 per cent in the next fiscal year, based in part on the UNDESA World Economic Forecasting Model.
But the government of Bangladesh has projected the economic growth rate to be 8.2 per cent in 2020–21.
On January 5, the World Bank iterated that the country’s GDP would grow by 1.6 per cent in 2020–21 due to the lingering COVID-19 pandemic.
Finance minister AHM Mustafa Kamal dismissed the latest WB forecast, saying that the projection should not be given importance.
