The New Nation - Internet Edition

BSS, Dhaka

The country's 'best years' of development is lying ahead when the GDP growth may hit up to 8 percent in next decade according to expert projections.

The first such forecast came in a report by FBCCI, presented recently to a gathering of business leaders and politicians prior to the general elections. The just released annual report of the Bangladesh Bank made almost similar projections.

These projections echoed the growth roadmap indicators of Awami League which have find place in its election manifesto for the next five years and vision 2021.

The central bank's projections said, the country's GDP growth may reach 6.5 percent in the current fiscal 2008-09 to further accelerate to 7.0 percent in 2009-10 and 7.2 in 2010-11.

This growth performance would however, depend on fulfillment of certain conditions and avoiding certain others.

Political stability coupled with stability of macroeconomic fundamentals, solving power crisis and infrastructure problems and a short lived global recession are some of the conditions which may determine the pace of the growth to attain the targets.

These will be the major challenges for the new government, besides bringing down the prices of essentials and lowering the cost of agricultural inputs and other economic benefits to common people, experts say.

The achievements of these targets will, moreover, depend on increased private sector investment, foreign direct investment, skill development and improving vocational training, expanding the SME sector and achieving greater export diversification.

Experts have emphasized establishing direct linkages between industry and universities and other training institutions to improve education and skill development.

More emphasis should also go to creating more center of academic excellence to promote skilled manpower to meet domestic and external demand now on steady rise.

These are big problems but not insurmountable, said a chamber leader pointing landslide election victory and level of popular support that the AL-led grand alliance received in the just concluded polls to build new institutions and expand existing ones, said the chamber leader.

The business sources said, Bangladesh is highly dependent on RMG export and greater focus now must go to improving the technology to work out new fashion and design to make Bangladesh made apparels more attractive at low cost at a time when global economic recession is affecting export market seriously.

One of the biggest challenges to new government to achieve the projected growth is power shortage and experts have positively taken the AL emphasis to quickly set up new power plants to meet the growing demand gap.

They also laid emphasis on taking exploration work of at least one gas well in the first 100 days of the new government while it should have a target of exploration of at least six gas wells per annum over the next few years.

Shortage of gas is forcing many power plants sitting idle and newly built factories remaining defunct while waiting to go for production due to poor electricity supply and frequent load shedding, business leaders allege.

They said, Bangladesh is poised to go for higher growth in the next couple of years and the new socio-political environment is quite supportive of it at the moment. The growth snags of the past two years may start moving out, they said pinning best hope to new government initiatives now in the offing.