Bangladesh, one of the world's poorest nations, could become a middle-income country by 2020 by using its own resources and building a stable infrastructure, an Asian Development Bank official said on Sunday.
About half of Bangladesh's population lives on less than $1 a day and its annual per capita income was $520 in the year to June 2007. The World Bank defines states with per capita income of less than $750 as "least developed countries".
"With higher growth (GDP) rates of 8-9 percent per year, Bangladesh can become a MIC even earlier than 2020," said Hua Du, Bangladesh country director of the ADB, but cautioned that "the path is not so easy or comfortable".
In January, central bank chief Salahuddin Ahmed said the economy would grow at 6.2 percent in 2007/08, down from 6.5 percent the previous year after two spells of floods and a severe cyclone hit the South Asian country in the second half of 2007. But Hua Du was more cautious on the impoverished country's economic prospects, saying that the growth rate in the fiscal year to June 2008 could even fall below 6 percent.
"Due to several natural calamities last year and tremendous pressure for huge food and oil imports with soaring prices in the international markets, the economy may not grow as the central bank hopes," she told foreign journalists.
The disasters killed more than 4,000 people, destroyed nearly 1.8 million tonnes of the main staple rice and washed away huge tracts of infrastructure in the emergency-ruled country of over 140 million people.
Official estimates show the country faces a food grain shortfall of around 2 million tonnes, which the interim government headed by former central bank governor Fakhruddin Ahmed is struggling to meet through imports.
Bangladesh could implement only a quarter of the annual development programme in the first seven months of the fiscal year, and Hua Du said spending needed to be accelerated. The original development programme for this fiscal year was worth of 265 billion taka ($3.9 billion) and during July-January the spending was only about 67 billion taka, compared with a little over 80 billion in the same period of the previous year.
Hua Du said better physical and social infrastructure, stable policy and greater use of domestic resources were needed to attract private sector investment.