Roundup: Bangladesh's July-April trade deficit balloons to over 8 bln USD as import rises on easing political strife

Bangladesh's trade deficit swelled by over 50 percent year-on-year to 8.49 billion U.S. dollars during the July to April period of the just concluded 2014-15 fiscal year as import marked rise on easing political strife in the country, an official said Wednesday.

The Bangladesh Bank (BB) official, who declianed to be unnamed, told Xinhua that the country exported 24.966 billion U.S. dollars of goods while it imported items worth 33.460 billion U.S. dollars in the first ten months of July 2014-June 2015 fiscal year.

The overall trade deficit in the same period of the previous fiscal year was nearly 5.509 billion U.S. dollars when Bangladesh' s export earning and import payment stood at 24.32 billion and 29. 83 billion U.S. dollars respectively, he said.

In the first ten months of the 2014-15 fiscal year, the BB data showed that Bangladesh's export and import earnings surged 2.67 percent and 12.19 percent respectively compared to the same period a year earlier.

Trade deficit kept widening as Bangladesh's imports soared in the recent months after months of slump.

He said Bangladesh's import orders, which usually grow by around 20 percent to 40 percent, saw a slower single-digit growth in the first three months of 2015 as the economic activities felt the pinch of intensified political unrest.

Political tension in Bangladesh heightened in January after former prime minister Khaleda Zia's opposition alliance geared up anti-government agitation programs.

Zia's BNP and its allies have launched a nationwide transport blockade since Jan. 5, demanding fresh elections under a non-party caretaker government system.

As tension eased, the BB official said the businessmen who had adopted a wait-and-see approach in the months have now gone for huge import of capital machinery and industrial raw materials.

The country's industrial sector looks set to perform better in the coming months although export income yet to pick up.

Hope export will pick up with the rise in import of raw material, said the official.

Trade deficit, which narrowed 3 percent to 6.81 billion U.S. dollars in the 2013-14 fiscal year compared to previous fiscal year, is nothing unusual for a developing country like Bangladesh which strives for more industrialization.

Meanwhile, the official said huge trade gap is unlikely to create a pressure on the balance of payment as comfortable receipts of remittances from some 9 million non-resident Bangladeshis living and working in over 100 countries will help the central bank cushion its impact.

It's not a big problem for Bangladesh as remittances offset rising trade deficit, he added.

According to the BB, the overall remittances rose to 11.25 billion dollars during the first nine months (July-March) of the just concluded fiscal, posting a 7.21-percent growth year-on-year. Endi