If industrial and service sector is negatively impacted, and we can't bank on mega construction projects to boost growth then where does the growth come from in Q2, Q3 and Q4 for 6 percent? Consumption cannot sustain 6 percent growth when people have no income coming in and government is hesitant towards large scale direct cash injection into the economy. It is madness to suggest that agriculture will get us 6 percent growth. What happens if this pandemic spreads to our countryside? or we are hit with second wave and third wave of COVID?
This is no room for flexibility in this statement and there was no need to issue such over the top statements. This is a simple matter where the Finance Minister should disagree with IMF and World Bank assessment by saying Bangladesh can easily beat the 2 to 3 percent projections. This is a confident enough statement. By tagging a number (6 percent), we have cornered ourselves and we don't even know how this pandemic will play out for the rest of the year in Bangladesh and the rest of the world. This is not a supply side problem alone that we can solve by ourselves. This pandemic is hitting the demand side equally hard. People don't have incomes to buy things so we can't grow until the global economy recovers from this pandemic. In the best circumstance, we can hope for a U-shaped global recovery if there is a vaccine in 12 months.