BBS to publish quarterly GDP data from 2024

Business Report :
The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) will publish quarterly data on the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) from 2024, said Md Matiar Rahman, director general of the state statistics agency.
The BBS will publish the GDP data from the first quarter of 2024, he said in a seminar on the occasion of National Statistics Day-2023 at the bureau’s headquarters in Dhaka.
The BBS has taken the move to release quarterly GDP data as it was one of the conditions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for the upcoming $4.5 billion loan for Bangladesh.
Rahman said the BBS starts calculation after getting data from various sources of the government.
The National Board of Revenue (NBR)- one of the biggest data sources of the BBS-does not release quarterly data, which is why the BBS also cannot prepare GDP’s quarterly data, he said.
The statistics bureau is also planning to change its consumer price index from July this year according to the guideline set by the IMF, Rahman said. “Data of 722 food and non-food items under 12 categories will be taken instead of the current 412 items under 8 categories.”