Bangladesh will receive $300 million as direct budgetary support from the World Bank and Japan for the next fiscal year starting in July 2009, a senior finance ministry official said on Sunday. The official said that Japan became the first bilateral donor for such assistance after it confirmed last week it would contribute on top of the Wold Bank's $200 million.
"The assistance from Japan will be injected to fight the effects of the climate changes," the official told Reuters. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk to the media. In the present financial year, the government received $300 million as budgetary support from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. "The support will help to keep the fiscal deficit below five percent of the gross domestic product," the official said.
Impoverished Bangladesh depends on external assistance to meet its annual development expenditure, although the amount of foreign aid has been decreasing since 1990s. The country's dependency on foreign aid has started declining significantly after 1999 when the country received $1.5 billion worth of external assistance, which was little more than four percent of the GDP.