Do we need a budget, really?
Shamsul Huq Zahid
Finance Minister AMA Muhith late last week placed a mega- budget in the national parliament for the fiscal 2011-12. A sort of hype is created by the media before and after the presentation of the budget over fiscal measures that have far wider implications on the performance of some major sectors of the economy.
But do we need an annual budget when the government borrows 28 paisa for a taka it spends and sets aside 15.5 per cent of the budgetary resources to pay interest on its debt, domestic and foreign?
Such a question, if asked by taxpayers, is likely to prompt the policymakers to raise their eyebrows.
Yet the taxpayers must not bother and keep on asking questions about the quality of spending of the money they pay to the government, particularly when there are lots of scopes for saving resources from going waste and divert the same to some real productive activities.
Going by the size of the budget for the next fiscal, it may not be improper on the part of the taxpayers to ask, at least, a couple of questions to budget-makers: have the budgetary resources been rightly allocated and could it be possible to bring down the level of borrowing, particularly from the domestic sources including banks?
The total size of the proposed national budget for the fiscal 2011-12 is Tk. 1635.89 billion, including the non-development expenditure of Tk. 1163.13 billion and the development expenditure of Tk. 472.76 billion.
The major part of the resource allocations proposed in the non-development part of the budget for next fiscal is meant to meet the expenditures on account of pay, allowances and pension of the public servants (23 per cent), grants in aid (17.4 per cent), interest payments (15.5 per cent), goods and services (10.1 per cent) and subsidies (8.0 per cent).
There is no denying that the state needs administrative machinery and the taxpayers do have no choice other than supporting it, financially, by paying duties and taxes. Similarly there are other expenditures that the state can hardly avoid. While doing so, most governments across the world are forced to borrow. Take for instance, the USA, the world's richest country. The US government now borrows 40 cents for a dollar it spends annually.
But Bangladesh is not the USA. Resources are hard to mobilize here and the policymakers have to cajole the external borrowers, including the multilateral ones, to secure funds for its development expenditures. However, it is the taxpayers who carry the debt-burden.
The taxpayers in this country do not have any tangible reason to draw satisfaction from the money spent on the sustenance of large yet ineffective administrative machinery. The services the governments, elected or otherwise, deliver in the name of public welfare are highly inadequate and flawed. The quality of both economic and political governance has also been poor and corruption-ridden.
Against the backdrop of such an unsatisfactory performance, substantial borrowing by the government from both domestic and foreign sources to meet budgetary expenditures, obviously, is bound to irritate the taxpayers.
It does appear that the government could have brought down the borrowing target set for the upcoming fiscal through prudent allocation of resources the generation of which might appear relatively tough because of adverse domestic and external environment.
The government does need to ensure substantial investment by both public and private sectors to achieve a 7.0 per cent economic growth target set for the next fiscal. The government, on its part, has prepared an annual development programme (ADP), which is bigger by Tk.101 billion than the revised one for the outgoing fiscal. There are lots of questions about the quality of the development spending and the capacity of the project executing agencies.
Assurances have been aplenty from the policymakers from time to time to improve both quality of development projects and the capacity of the implementation agencies. But the situation has remained almost unchanged. In every third quarter of a financial year, the ADP is invariably downsized because of the poor rate of execution of projects and hurried efforts are made to complete many projects, taking a toll on their quality.
One has no other option but to keep one's fingers crossed as far as private sector investment is concerned in the upcoming fiscal because of a number of factors, including the tight liquidity situation in the banking sector and the continued erosion in the value of taka vis-à-vis the greenback and the resultant effects in relation to some other major currencies that have appreciated against the greenback.
In fact the size of the country's annual budget has been getting bigger and bigger more for meeting bloated administrative expenses, subsidies and interest payments than for anything substantive, in terms of real development and employment generation. That the situation would improve anytime soon is hard to expect.