SANEM, an economic think tank, proposes a 2-year Recovery Plan for Bangladesh instead of the 8th Five Year Plan now on the perspective of the outbreak of COVID-19 that has created tremendous impact on the country’s socio-economic structure.
Dr. Selim Raihan, Executive Director of South Asian Network on Economic Modeling (SANEM), has made the proposal with a set of eight point recommendations, in a statement, released on Thursday.
The points, he made are : This 2-year Recovery Plan will aim at taking the economy back to the December 2019 state; Delay the beginning of the 8th Five Year Plan by 2 years to 2022. The 8th Plan needs to be re-written.
A large part of it seems to be irrelevant at this stage. (3) Devise fiscal stimulus packages and monetary policies to support the RMG, other export-oriented and domestic-market oriented industries and SMEs. At this moment, the focus is only on the RMG, which is not helpful at all.
He also suggested to devise and extend social protection programs for a vast number of marginalised, near-marginalised and a large section of suddenly vulnerable population, undertake some 'politically feasible' policy reforms in the areas of trade, tax, banking sectors.
The points also include exploring ways for generating resources (domestic and external) to support the fiscal stimulus and eased monetary policy measures, suspend the LDC graduation target by at least 3 more years and finally raise the voice at the global level to push the SDG target year from 2030 to 2035.
