Standing in line to try to buy food, Rekha Begum is distraught. Like many others in Bangladesh, she is struggling to find affordable daily essentials like rice, lentils and onions.

“I went to two other places, but they told me they don’t have supplies. Then I came here and stood at the end of the queue,” said Begum, 60, as she waited for nearly two hours to buy what she needed from a truck selling food at subsidized prices in the capital, Dhaka.

Bangladesh’s economic miracle is under severe strain as fuel price hikes amplify public frustrations over rising costs for food and other necessities. Fierce opposition criticism and small street protests have erupted in recent weeks, adding to pressures on the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, which has sought help from the International Monetary Fund to safeguard the country’s finances.

Experts say Bangladesh’s predicament is nowhere nearly as severe as Sri Lanka’s, where months’ long unrest led its long-time president to flee the country and people are enduring outright shortages of food, fuel and medicines, spending days in queues for essentials. But it faces similar troubles: excessive spending on ambitious development projects, public anger over corruption and cronyism and a weakening trade balance.

Such trends are undermining Bangladesh’s impressive progress, fueled largely by its success as a garment manufacturing hub, toward becoming a more affluent, middle-income country.

The government raised fuel prices by more than 50% last month to counter soaring costs due to high oil prices, triggering protests over the rising cost of living. That led authorities to order the subsidized sales of rice and other staples by government-appointed dealers.

The latest phase of the program, which began Sept. 1, should help about 50 million people, said Commerce Minister Tipu Munshi.

“The government has taken a number of measures to reduce pressures on low-income earners. That is impacting the market and keeping prices of daily commodities competitive,” he said.

The policies are a stopgap for bigger global and domestic challenges.

The war in Ukraine has pushed higher prices of many commodities at a time when they already were surging as demand recovered with a waning of the coronavirus pandemic. In the meantime, countries like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Laos — among many — have seen their currencies weaken against the dollar, adding to the costs for dollar-denominated imports of oil and other goods.

To ease the strain on public finances and foreign reserves, the authorities put a moratorium on big, new projects, cut office hours to save energy and imposed limits on imports of luxury goods and non-essential items, such as sedans and SUVs.

“The Bangladesh economy is facing strong headwinds and turbulence,” said Ahmad Ahsan, an economist and director of the Dhaka-based Policy Research Institute, a think tank. “Suddenly we are back to the era of rolling power cuts, with the taka and the forex reserves under pressure,” he said.

Millions of low-income Bangladeshis, like Begum, whose family of five can barely afford to eat fish or meat even once a month, still struggle to put food on the table.

Bangladesh has made huge strides in the past two decades in growing its economy and fighting poverty. Investments in garment manufacturing have provided jobs for tens of millions of workers, mostly women. Exports of apparel and related products account for more than 80% of its exports.

But with fuel costs so high, authorities shut diesel-run power plants that produced at least 6% of total production, cutting daily power generation by 1,500 megawatts and disrupting manufacturing.

Imports in the last fiscal year, ending in June, 2022, rose to $84 billion, while exports have fluctuated, leaving a record current account deficit of $17 billion.

More challenges are ahead.

Deadlines are fast approaching for repaying foreign loans related to at least 20 mega infrastructure projects, including the $3.6 billion River Padma bridge built by China and a nuclear power plant mostly funded by Russia. Experts say Bangladesh needs to prepare for when repayment schedules ramp up between 2024 and 2026.

In July, in a move economists view as a precautionary measure, Bangladesh sought a $4.5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, becoming the third country in South Asia to recently seek its help after Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

Finance Minister A.H.M. Mustafa Kamal said that the government asked the IMF to begin formal negotiations on loans “for balance of payments and budgetary assistance.” The IMF said it was working with Bangladesh to draw up a plan.

Bangladesh’s foreign reserves have been falling, potentially undermining its ability to meet its loan obligations. By Wednesday they had dropped to $36.9 billion from $45.5 billion a year earlier, according to the central bank.

Usable foreign reserves would be about $30 billion, said Zahid Hussain, a former chief economist of the World Bank’s Dhaka office.

“I would not say this is a crisis situation. This is still enough to meet three months of imports, three and half months of imports. But it also means that … you do not have a lot of room for maneuvering on the reserve front,” he said.

Still, despite what some economists say is excessive spending on some costly projects, Bangladesh is better equipped to weather hard times than some other countries in the region.

Its farm sector — tea, rice and jute are major exports — is an effective “shock absorber,” and its economy, four to five times larger than Sri Lanka’s, is less vulnerable to outside calamities like a downturn in tourism.

The economy is forecast to grow at a 6.6% pace this fiscal year, according to the Asia Development Bank’s latest forecast, and the country’s total debt is still relatively small.

“I think in the current context, the most important difference between Sri Lanka and Bangladesh is the debt burden, particularly the external debt,” said Hussain.

Bangladesh’s external debt is under 20% of its gross domestic product, while Sri Lanka’s was around 126% in the first quarter of 2022.

“So, we have some space. I mean debt as a source of stress on the macroeconomy is not much of a much problem yet,” he said.

Waiting in a line to buy subsidized food, 48-year-old Mohammed Jamal said he was not feeling such leeway for his own family.

“It has become unbearable trying to maintain our standard of living,” Jamal said. “Prices are just out of reach for the common people,” he said. “It’s tough living this way.”
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«Ми в одному човні, всі ми – європейці, азіати, африканці, арабські та латиноамериканські країни. Ми маємо дати відсіч цим загрозам спільно»
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As the United States heads into November’s midterm elections, the Federal Reserve on Wednesday announced another sharp increase in interest rates as it continues its struggle against stubbornly high inflation. The increase of three-quarters of a percentage point raised the benchmark federal funds rate target to between 3% and 3.25%, the highest it has been in nearly 15 years. 

In announcing the change, the Fed said that further increases in the target rate would be “appropriate.” On average, the members of the central bank’s Open Market Committee projected that the midpoint of the target range by year end would be about 4.25%. 

The Fed’s battle against inflation has been less effective than policymakers had hoped. Annualized inflation in August was 8.3%, only slightly lower than it had been in July, and more than four times the Fed’s target rate of 2%.  

Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in a press conference Wednesday that the Fed was committed to reducing inflation, even though doing so would require an extended period of slow economic growth and would likely increase the unemployment rate. 

He characterized the Fed’s choice as being between two evils. 

“Higher interest rates, slower growth and a softening labor market are all painful for the public that we serve, but they’re not as painful as failing to restore price stability,” Powell said.

Political uncertainty

The fight against inflation is taking place amid political uncertainty in the U.S. As for the midterms, some experts say Republicans stand a strong chance of taking over one of the two chambers of Congress, which would break Democrats’ unified control of the legislative and executive branches of government and allow Republicans to block much of President Joe Biden’s agenda. 

The choice between rising prices and rising interest rates combined with higher unemployment may not be particularly appealing to voters, and neither alternative will likely benefit the incumbent president or his Democratic Party. 

Pointing out how Americans are suffering from persistently high inflation has been a major part of Republicans’ campaign strategy this year, and with good reason. In early September, according to a poll taken by the Gallup organization, 56% of Americans reported that their families were experiencing at least “moderate hardship” because of rising prices, with 12% characterizing the hardship as “severe.” 

In remarks on the Senate floor this week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell hammered home the GOP message, saying, “Month after month after month, Democrats’ policy failures are continuing to add inflation on top of inflation. The inflation rate plateauing above 8% does not mean that families are catching a break. It means exactly the opposite. It means that families are continuing to see prices go up, and up, and up all the time.”  

Biden’s response

Biden, meanwhile, has been touting price decreases when they occur and deflecting blame for the increases when possible. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February drove up gasoline prices — the most visible signal of inflation for many Americans — Biden publicly blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for consumers’ pain. 

This week, with gas prices falling, the president declared on Twitter, “Folks, gas prices are now back to levels they were at in early March. That means nearly all of the increases since the beginning of Russia’s war in Ukraine have been wiped out.” 

While some prices have fallen, however, others remain stubbornly high. Groceries, housing and electricity, in particular, are much more expensive now than they were a year ago.

Effect on voters

Mark Hamrick, Washington bureau chief for Bankrate.com, told VOA that gauging the political impact of the Fed’s decisions is tricky. 

“I’m not sure that voters are going to be spending a lot of time parsing the nuances of monetary policy with respect to their voting decisions, but clearly, the state of the economy is something that affects everyone,” he said. “The impacts of a variety of influences, including high and sustained inflation, the failure of wages to keep up with the rate of inflation, are things that voters and everyone else are very much mindful of.” 

He added, “I think that you have to say that to some degree, the current environment does not necessarily help incumbents, per se. But you have to handicap that in the context of, ‘What is the prism through which a voter is looking at the current situation?’ And that’s where it becomes much more murky.”  

Fed actions so far

The Federal Reserve is raising rates to reduce demand in the economy. High demand tends to drive inflation as buyers bid up the price of increasingly scarce goods. As interest rates go higher, though, money becomes more “expensive.” That means a dollar in a savings account earns a higher return than it did before the rate increase and makes account holders somewhat less likely to spend it.

While higher rates might eventually tame inflation, they carry a different kind of cost. When rates rise, it becomes more expensive to borrow money, meaning that businesses may be less willing to invest, and prospective homebuyers may face higher mortgage payments. Incurring credit card debt also becomes more costly, which may tame consumer purchases.

Higher rates are likely to slow economic growth and to increase unemployment. The current rate of unemployment is now low by historical standards, at 3.7%. Members of the Federal Open Market Committee, in Wednesday’s report, indicated that they expect that rate to be as high as 4.5% by the end of next year, which translates into well over 1 million people losing their jobs. 

The Fed’s rate increase on Wednesday marks the fifth time the central bank has raised rates in calendar year 2022. After starting the year with a target rate of between 0% and 0.25%, the Open Market Committee began with a modest quarter-percentage-point increase in March, followed by a half-percentage-point increase in May. With inflation continuing to rise, the rate hikes became sharper, with a three-quarter-percentage-point increase in June and then another three-quarter-percentage-point jump in July. 

Global phenomenon

While inflation is a major political issue among Americans, who tend to blame it on the current president’s administration, analysts note that the inflation the U.S. is experiencing is part of a global phenomenon. 

Annualized inflation in other parts of the world has been on the rise as well. In the European Union in August, it was above 9%, though the differences across countries could be dramatic. Poland, for example, has experienced 16.2% inflation in the year ending in August, while in France, the rate has been a more modest 5.9%. 

Prices are also rising in other parts of the world, though at different rates. In the Americas, Canada has seen rates rise 7%, compared with 8.7% in both Mexico and Brazil. In Asia, India has experienced a 7% increase, while China and Japan have seen only 2.5% and 3% increases, respectively.
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У бюджет закладено 1 трильйон 141 мільярд гривень на національну безпеку й оборону
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