The government has requested the World Bank to provide 750 million dollars in budget support instead of 500 million dollars to deal with the current economic situation and the crisis in the Bjarve. According to sources in the Ministry of Finance, Bangladesh made this proposal in a bilateral meeting during the spring meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) held in Washington on April 15-20.

The delegation of Bangladesh held a bilateral meeting with the delegation led by the World Bank's South Asia Region Vice President Martin Reiser in Washington on April 17 and the delegation led by World Bank Country Director Abdulai Sek in Bangladesh on April 17 and 19.

In all those meetings, under the Second Recovery and Resilience Development Policy, $500 million and an additional $250 million in budget support were requested.

Officials of the Department of Finance and Economic Relations Department (ERD) said that the World Bank had given initial consent to provide 250 million dollars in budget support in the current fiscal year under the Second Recovery and Resilience Development Policy. But to deal with the current economic situation and reserve crisis, in a letter sent to the World Bank on November 27, the government proposed to increase the amount of budget support to 500 million dollars in the Second Recovery and Resilience Development Policy.

After the World Bank gave initial consent to this proposal, there has been progress in the creation of the policy matrix, and a related loan agreement with the World Bank is expected to be signed by next June.

The economy of Bangladesh is also going through challenging times due to the overall global situation including the Russia-Ukraine war, the recent crisis in the Middle East, instability in fuel prices. In this situation, additional budget support of 250 million dollars has been requested for the current financial year, the officials said.

Meanwhile, in the current financial year, the government has asked for another 300 million dollars from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), 400 million dollars from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and 300 million euros ($325 million) from the French government's development aid agency AFD.

Since last July, the government has received $490 million in budget support commitments from ADB and South Korea. Among them, loan agreement of 400 million dollars with ADB and 90 million dollars with Korea was signed.

A budget support loan agreement titled 'Promoting Climate Resilient Development Program (Subprogram 1)' was signed with ADB on December 11 and a budget support loan agreement with Korea was signed on December 11.

Usually development partners impose certain conditions for receiving budgetary support. Under this budget support from ADB and Korea, the government will implement various climate related reform programs.

According to ERD data, the government took a total of $11.09 billion in budgetary support till last fiscal year (June 30, 2023). Basically, the amount of government budget support has increased in the post-Corona pandemic period to purchase vaccines and economic recovery. In addition, the government strengthened the budget support program in the economic situation caused by the Ukraine-Russia war.

According to ERD data, the government received $1.769 billion in fiscal year 2022-23, $2.597 billion in fiscal year 2021-22, $1.09 billion in fiscal year 2021-21 and $1 billion in fiscal year 2019-20. In the previous fiscal year, the budget support was $0.251 billion.