Finance Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal today said the government will focus on sustainable economic recovery in the third year of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Now, in the third year of the pandemic, our priority will be to sustain the economic recovery by maintaining the trend of income generation and job creation and thus put the economy on a solid foundation. Therefore, we will continue to implement incentive programmes in the next fiscal year,” he said.
The minister said this while placing the Tk 6,78,064 crore proposed national budget for FY22-23, wearing the traditional Mujib Coat over Panjabi, at Jatiya Sangsad in the city.
The title of the budget for the next fiscal year is “Return to the Path of Development; Leaving the COVID-19 Behind”.
In his speech, Kamal said, “At the same time, we will provide all kinds of policy support to all the important sectors of the economy including banks, financial institutions, and business enterprises in the industrial and service sectors so that they can fully overcome the effects of the pandemic.”
“I would like to inform the nation through you that the next fiscal year will be our last year to overcome the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic,” he added.
The government will continue the initiatives taken to address COVID-19 and economic recovery in the coming fiscal year. However, as the context of the crisis changes, priorities would be changed, the minister added.
“In the first year of the crisis, our priorities were to build the health sector’s capacity, provide food and humanitarian assistance to the low-income people, who have suddenly become unemployed, and provide urgent assistance to
sustain production and employment in the key economic sectors such as the agriculture and the export,” he added.
The finance minister said, “We successfully tackled the challenges of the first year through the rapid expansion of specialised COVID treatment in government management, recruitment of additional physicians and health workers, and humanitarian assistance activities for low-income people.”
In the second year, he informed, “After the initial shock, our priority was shifted to bring everyone under the COVID vaccine and support the industry and services sector to ensure economic recovery at a faster pace. We successfully achieved the target in the second year by bringing almost all citizens above 12 years of age under the vaccination programme and successfully implementing incentive packages for the industry and services sectors.”
