Speakers at a webinar said digital economy will make transactions faster, reliable, and reduce cost of doing business.
“If all economic activities are digitalized, transaction would be faster-reliable and cost of doing business will decrease. Besides, Informal and hidden economy would be transformed into formal while gray and black economy turn into transparent one,” they opined.
Speakers made the remarks at the webinar on 'Economics of Digital Payment System for Growth: Comparative Practices and the Bangladesh Narratives' organized by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Bangladesh (ICAB), said a press release on Thursday.
Post, Telecommunication and Information Technology Minister Mustafa Jabbar joined the event as the chief guest.
Speakers said, `Now Bangladesh is evolving with enormous economic potentialities. It has maintained an average growth rate of 8 per cent over last few years. This is because the economy has been turning to
industrialized digital economy where everything is connected digitally'.
The traditional revenue collection, banking, payment system, all components of a country's Economic Machine are now transforming into digital operations, they added.
Experts in these areas claim that digitizing revenue collection and expenditure payment with a real-time settlement would result in increase of revenue, reduce transaction costs and other costs, would increase annual revenue minimum of four times from the analogue and paper-based collection system.
ICAB President Shahadat Hossain delivered address of welcome. Professor Mustafizur Rahman, Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) and Khondkar Atique-e- Rabbani, Member - ICAB & Managing Director, The Computers Ltd joined as panel speakers.
ICAB Past President A K Gulam Kibria was the session chairman while Jamaluddin Ahmed, Past President-ICAB presented the keynote paper.
ICAB President Shahadat Hossain said, the contribution of IT industry to the ongoing economic growth of Bangladesh is getting bigger day by day.
He said, Bangladesh has made significant progress in the digital economy in the last four years and has taken place in the list of 'Top Movers' of 2019. The other three countries on the list are: Ukraine, South Africa and Algeria. This list has been compiled by assessing the progress of the world
in digital economy from 2015 to 2019.
Keynote speaker Jamaluddin Ahmed in his paper said, adoption of digital technology causes the changes to economic behavior and the costs of doing business which is shifting downwards as digital technology evolves in processing and running billions of economic transactions.
The payment system of a country entails the transfer of value from one to the other economic agent. As the economic activity grew following agriculture and industrial advances, increasing payments needed to be made over greater distances, and so both volumes and values of interbank obligations increased,
he said.
ICAB Vice President NKA Mobin gave concluding remarks.
