Staff Correspondent

The committee on drafting a white paper on the state of economy will investigate how the calculations on macroeconomic indicators like gross national income (GNI) and inflation rates were done in the past, the committee’s head Dr Debapriya Bhattacharya said on Tuesday.

“In the broad line we have identified the estimations that had been done were based on very weak physical foundation,” he said while briefing reporters at the General Economic Division.

He mentioned on many occasions the officials who prepared the estimations felt helpless under pressure from the government.

“They were compelled to give those estimations, they told us so,” he added.

The briefing came after the committee sat with the government officials from 24 organisations who deal with statistics and data related to the economy.

Debapriya, a distinguished fellow at Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) and convenor of the Citizen’s Platform for SDGs, Bangladesh, said that they would look into the how national income and inflation rate were estimated in the past.

“We will take these two as sample items and try to look deeply,” he said.

He also mentioned that the committee will look into the matter of magnitude of the problem and its characteristics.

“We are finding out ground zero, from ground zero it would be possible to build the building, we are trying to understand whether it would be possible to construct the building,” he said.