Bangladesh’s export earnings witnessed a 2.5 per cent year-on-year growth in July-August of FY25, according to the Balance of Payments (BoP) data of Bangladesh Bank published on Tuesday.
Export earnings stood at $7.16 billion in the first two months of FY25, compared to $6.98 billion in FY24 in the same month of FY24. The readymade garments (RMG) – a major contributor – earned $6.5 billion with 5 per cent year-on-year growth in FY25 during the same period.
It should be noted that in July this year, the Export Promotion Bureau (EPB) had decided not to publish export data for the next three months to resolve data errors in export statistics.
During this period, the government agency plans to find out the reason behind the discrepancies in export data and will correct it. After that, it will begin publishing the monthly data again.
However, the Bangladesh Bank published the export data for July FY25 using the National Board of Revenue (NBR) and EPB as sources.
The regulator noted in its BoP report that the NBR revises and provides the export shipment data to the central bank and EPB by adjusting multiple entries for FY24.
The BoP data showed that import payments declined by 1.2 per cent to $9.91 billion during July-Aug period of FY25, which was $10 billion in the same period of FY24.
Trade balance gap narrowed due to the decline in import payment. Such a balance gap was $2.75 billion in the first two months of current FY, which was $3.04 billion in the same period of previous FY.
Current account balance of BoP is now positive $111 million for July-August of FY25, which was a $610 million deficit in the same period of FY24. The overall balance was $1.39 billion negative in July-August of FY25, compared to $1.69 billion negative in the same months of FY25.