Finance and Planning Minister Amir Khosru Mahmud Chowdhury said the days of running the country on money provided by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Asian Development Bank are over.
The government is changing the public finance architecture of Bangladesh, the minister said at the inaugural ceremony of World Investor Week at the Krishibid Institution in Dhaka today.
The Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission (BSEC) has organised the weeklong event, which will continue until October 12.
“We have already cancelled the IMF programme. We are going to the market to raise money. We are going to float dollar bonds in New York, and we will go for Panda bonds, Samurai bonds and local currency bonds. Bangladesh’s financial architecture is changing,” the minister said.
The money that donor agencies provide will not be enough to take Bangladesh to a trillion-dollar economy, he said.
“I need $50 billion every year; you all together provide $10 billion, and I don’t have time for that anymore,” Khosru said.
“If we go to buy airplanes, why should the Bangladesh government have to pay so much money?”
Referring to Biman Bangladesh’s latest move to buy airplanes, he said, “It (Biman) is an enterprise. It has to go to the market and borrow. Why should the Bangladesh government provide the funds? Do you want money provided by the government to run your enterprise? It’s not going to happen anymore.”
He said the stock exchanges and intermediaries had all failed over the previous decade, and their failure was so massive that the capital market had fallen into the same ditch as the economy.
“Now the government is lifting the economy and the capital market back up from the ditch.”
At the event, the minister said the Bangladesh capital market had never received proper attention in the past.
After independence, when former president Ziaur Rahman opened the Dhaka Stock Exchange and provided the opportunity to open mutual funds, it was a far-reaching idea, but that did not continue later, he said.
Subsequently, the support required for the capital market, ranging from policy support to other measures, did not come holistically, he said, adding that many things were done on a piecemeal basis.
As a result, the capital market never really took off and grew as it should have. Instead, both the government and the private sector became overly dependent on banks, and that too at high interest rates, the minister said.
“Every regulatory body was functioning like an island, working in their respective spaces, but they never coordinated. That was another weakness of our capital market. Now, all regulators are sitting together every month,” he said.
“The market is a shallow market with no depth. So, we have to create that depth, and to do so, we must create the proper environment. No good company will list in ‘a casino’. Those that are good companies, believe in good governance and practise self-regulation will not be part of ‘a casino’.”
At the event, Insurance Development and Regulatory Authority (IDRA) Chairman Mir Nadia Nivin said increasing the penetration of life insurance companies would be beneficial to the market.
“The insurers can provide long-term institutional capital to the bond market, equity market and infrastructure financing. And that is the scale of what is missing,” she said.
At the event, BSEC Chairman Masud Khan outlined the commission’s recent activities to restore investor confidence.
Tanvir Shahriar Ghani, special assistant to the prime minister on investment and capital market affairs, attended as the guest of honour.
Nazma Mobarek, secretary of the Financial Institutions Division of the Ministry of Finance, and Tanwir Habib Rahman and Hossain Sadat, commissioners of the BSEC, also spoke.