Posts and Telecommunication Adviser Mirza Azizul Islam yesterday urged the Saarc member countries to work together to cut cross border telecommunication tariffs. “I see the South Asian telecommunication market as a big market. We hope to work closely with our neighbour Saarc (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) countries to faster greater cooperation in reducing call tariffs with a view to forging a better network in the region,” he told the ninth meeting of the South Asian Telecommunications Regulators Council (SATRC) while inaugurating it at a hotel in Dhaka.

Authority to approve foreign private loans may be delegated to Bangladesh Bank to expedite the processing time, finance ministry sources said.

Foundry industry of Bangladesh can earn a lot of foreign exchange and also can provide jobs to thousands of unemployed people, Ainul Hoque Sohel, president of foundry owners’ association of Bangladesh, has said.

The Bangladesh Bank (BB) has invited fresh project proposals from innovative, experienced and new information technology (IT) entrepreneurs for ‘equity fund assistance’ to set up software industries.

Country’s trade deficit has increased by 223 percent in the first quarter of the current fiscal year due mainly to huge increase in food import. Despite strong remittance growth, the current account balance of the country stands at $23 million against strong surpluses of $445 million during the same period of FY2006-07. The balance was $629 million in the fourth quarter of the last fiscal year.

Trade liberalisation has cast a negative impact on the country’s employment, a study revealed yesterday. The finance adviser, however, disagreed with the findings saying it was due to ‘management inefficiency of firms’ and ‘technological changes’. “Export oriented sectors performed well in the liberalised regime. Other sectors failed to do well partly because of management inefficiency and technological changes,” Finance Adviser Mirza Azizul Islam told a function at the BRAC Cetre in Dhaka marking the release of the study.

The South Korean ambassador in Dhaka, Suk-Bum Park, on Sunday observed that recruitment of Bangladeshi workers in his country depends on how authorities of Dhaka do the preparatory work. ‘As we do not have any pre-determined quota for recruiting Bangladeshi nationals under the Employment Permit System, the number of workers we will take depends on how the BOESL deals with this,’ he said after the signing ceremony at the lone public recruiting agency’s office.

Brac has decided to write off micro-finance loans amounting to Tk 1 billion in the areas devastated by cyclone Sidr. The decision was taken yesterday based on the NGO’s initial assessment in the Sidr-affected areas, says a press release.

The government yesterday stepped in to end the row inside the FBCCI by appointing Syed Manzur Elahi as administrator and charging him to hold an election to the country’s leading trade body within 120 days.

Bangladesh will see a moderate 6 percent growth in FY ’08, down from 6.5 percent in FY 07, due mainly to political volatility, high inflation rate and fuel prices, said Citigroup. The US-based Citigroup published the growth prediction in its annual economic and market analysis on Asia Economic Prospects 2008 released recently.

The Bangladesh Bank (BB) sees the near-term economic outlook of the country as fairly good despite some downside risks including negative impact caused by flood and other natural calamities.

The Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce Industry (MCCI) has called for a well-coordinated approach, supported by allocation of financial resources and requisite institutional mechanisms, to address the problems in the areas hit by the natural disasters — floods and cyclones Sidr — not only for humanitarian but also for overall economic reasons.

The government is to send a high-powered delegation to Germany to urge the European country to remove a 12 percent security deposit it has imposed on Bangladeshi garment imports.

The caretaker government announced a seven-point strategy to ensure the well-being of the Bangladeshi workers abroad and expand the manpower-export market worldwide by removing the prevailing hurdles, reports UNB. Foreign and Overseas Employment Adviser Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury Wednesday announced the strategy, which includes exploring new manpower-export markets in the Scandinavian, European and East European countries like Norway, Sweden and Romania.

A total of 81 companies are vying for five licences to operate Interconnection Exchange (ICX) and International Gateway (IGW) operations in the country. Following the Bangladesh Telecommunication and Regulatory Commission’s (BTRC) invitation for granting licences, 39 companies submitted proposals for ICX licence yesterday, while 42 companies offered proposals for IGW licence the day before yesterday.

Terming free flow of information a driving force in democracy and good governance, Chief Adviser Fakhruddin Ahmed yesterday expressed the hope that the government will soon formulate a right to information act. “I hope the information and the law ministries would soon take a step for making this law effective,” he said while inaugurating a convention styled Right to Information for a Democratic and Corruption-free Bangladesh.

Denmark, the co-chair of Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDDR), appealed Wednesday to the donor group to support Bangladesh for an accelerated recovery from the serious after-effects of the cyclone, Sird, reports UNB.

In a bid to increase further its micro finance activities in rural areas, Brac, a leading micro finance institution in Bangladesh, has completed the closing of a new US$ 55 million equivalent taka loan facility from a group of international lenders.

The head of the World Trade Organisation marked sixty years of the multilateral trading system on Tuesday with a warning against any revival of protectionism. WTO director general Pascal Lamy noted that the global economy was now much more interlinked than at the time of the Great Depression in the 1930s and that ‘protectionist policies would lead to a domino effect with far more catastrophic consequences.’

A total of 42 firms have submitted their bids for setting up three international gateway exchanges in the private sector to route overseas calls to and from Bangladesh, said officials of the Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission.