New crops, services inflated GDP size

Farming of dragon or strawberry, collecting household kitchen waste and services like Uber and agent banking are among the components that contributed to 17% average annual rise in the size of gross domestic product (GDP) in last six years.

The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) says in current prices, the country's GDP rose to Tk34,840 billion in the 2020-21 fiscal year from Tk20,758 billion in 2015-16 on the back of new subsectors in agriculture, industry and services brought into account.

The official statistical agency has come up with the figures updating the GDP under the new base year of 2015-16. Earlier, the base year was 2005-2006. The change of the base year, however, marked a decline in the GDP growth rate to 5.43% in FY21 in constant price, which was 5.47 in the previous count.

The BBS report was presented at a meeting of the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (Ecnec) on Tuesday. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina presided over the meeting.

At the end of the meeting, Planning Minister MA Mannan said products, which were not incorporated in GDP before, have been added to GDP afresh.

"The BBS has done a lot of new surveys for this. As a result, our GDP size has increased more than before," he added.

According to the BBS report, about 20 new components, such as dragon fruit, strawberry, capsicum, have been included in the crop subsector. In addition, cattle and poultry meat production data, new survey data of the forest sector and other updated data have been included.

For calculating GDP in the industrial sector, all the data such as the "New Manufacturing Industry Survey" and the updated data of the construction sector survey and data from the household waste collection have been included.

The service sector includes new data on the transport sector, new private helicopter companies, Uber, Pathao, new technology from the real estate sector, new banks, mobile and agent banks, government's non-profit organisations and updated information on education and health sectors.

According to the BBS report, investment and national savings accounted for 30.76% and 32.15% of GDP, respectively, at current prices for the base year 2015-16, marking a rise from the previous calculations.

On the other hand, in the fiscal year 2005-06, the ratio of investment to national savings was 29.92% and 30.39%, respectively.