The government has set the gross domestic product growth target at 5.5 per cent for the 2025-2026 financial year.
Interim government鈥檚 finance adviser Salehuddin Ahmed on Monday announced the FY26 national budget amounting to Tk 7,89,999 crore.
However, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank, earlier predicted that the country鈥檚 growth would remain below 5 per cent.
The foreign lenders attributed the slow growth rate to the persistent structural and external challenges, including political instability, high inflation, energy shortages, industrial unrest and weakening global demand.
In his televised budget speech, Salehuddin said that due to the fight against inflation, the GDP growth rate might be slightly lower.
鈥楢ccording to the provisional estimates, the GDP growth in FY聽2024-25 could be 3.97 per cent. However, we expect the final estimate to be higher. We also expect that the growth rate will rise to 6.5 per cent in the medium term,鈥� he said.
The provisional GDP growth rate was 5 per cent for FY25 and the actual growth rate was 4.22 per cent for FY24.
The government also projected that the GDP might rise to 6 per cent in FY27 and 6.5 per cent in FY28.
Zahid Hussain, former lead economist of the World Bank Dhaka office, said that the GDP target for FY26 was achievable.
He said that if investment environment would not deteriorate further and the law and order situation improved, the target was quite achievable. In the budget speech, Salehuddin said that to increase private investment in the country, it was important to create a conducive environment.
鈥榃e are committed to identifying the existing obstacles to investment and removing them as soon as possible,鈥� he said.
The Bangladesh Investment Summit 2025 was organised in April to highlight the benefits of investment in Bangladesh, in which about four hundred and fifty foreign investors participated. A memorandum of understanding of $150 million was signed with a Chinese company and $110 million of foreign investment was received by start-up company ShopUp, the finance adviser said in his budget speech.
The one-stop service portal currently provides a total of 134 services from 43 organisations. Steps have been taken to map all the investment services of the country across the sectors and include them in the OSS. In addition, the Bangladesh single window has been launched under the National Board of Revenue to provide application and processing services on a single platform to improve the business environment, he added.