𝐃𝐞𝐛𝐮𝐧𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐈𝐧𝐟𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐌𝐲𝐭𝐡 𝐢𝐧 𝐅𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐫 𝐨𝐟 𝐃𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐨𝐩𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐌𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐏𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐲’ 𝐛𝐲 𝐃𝐫 𝐀𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐮𝐳𝐳𝐚𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐂𝐡𝐨𝐰𝐝𝐡𝐮𝐫𝐲

NUST Institute of Policy Studies (NIPS) and School of Social Sciences and Humanities (S3H) jointly hosted a keynote by Dr Anisuzzaman Chowdhury, Special Assistant to the Chief Advisor and Minister of State for Finance, Interim Government of Bangladesh, on “Debunking Inflation Myth in Favor of Developmental Monetary Policy.”

In his welcome remarks, Dr Ashfaque Hasan Khan, DG NIPS, highlighted the distinguished global academic and policymaking career of Dr. Chowdhury as a scholar-statesman par excellence. DG NIPS further underscored that the Interim Cabinet of Bangladesh comprises world-class experts headed by a Nobel Laureate.

During his keynote, Dr Anissuzaman Chowdhury commended NUST for its research excellence and high-quality human capital formation in Pakistan. He stressed the dire state of the Bangladeshi economy when the interim government took charge of the country. He said the previous regime, kleptocratic and completely dependent on international donors, had gutted the country’s finances and destroyed its educational system. He stated foreign loans had not helped his country. He said, the challenges notwithstanding, the interim government’s prudent policy of macroeconomic stabilisation had prevented the economic collapse of Bangladesh, with the full recovery of its capital market. He stated that Bangladesh, like any other developing nation, needs sustained high-quality inclusive growth. Dr Chowdhury cautioned that Western economics and Development textbooks could not provide lasting solutions to the problems of the Global South. He said development planners had to think hard about minimising the human costs of growth.

The Bangladeshi expert advised policy innovations for inclusive growth consisting of: central banks ignoring price changes of goods they cannot control: real sector supply-side responses to deal with pressure on prices; ease of financing for priority industries like renewables; credit tightening for inefficient sectors and industries; use of input-output and flow of funds tables for the design of macroeconomic policies in support of dynamic new investments, technologies, and economic diversification; prudential capital flow regulations; strict anti-monopoly enforcement; and financial inclusion.