About 69 per cent businesses did not get funds from the stimulus package announced by the Government to tackle the fallouts of the coronavirus pandemic, while 9 per cent do not even know of the packages even if only one-fifth of the surveyed firms availed the stimulus packages, majority of which are from the manufacturing sector, while amongst the industrial sectors, 58 per cent of the RMG firms received the stimulus package even as the rate is 40 per cent and 30 per cent for the textile and the leather industry, respectively. This was, reportedly, found in the fourth round of a nationwide firm-level survey with 500 business entities, carried out by the Asia Foundation and the South Asian Network on Economic Modeling or SANEM. Selim Raihan, the Executive Director of SANEM, read out the findings of the survey (at a webinar held on 2 April, Sunday), as per which, only around 22 per cent of businesses received funds from a stimulus package and the apparel sector got 58 per cent of the total incentives even as the transport sector got 5 per cent, retailers got 9 per cent and wholesale traders 6 per cent while the ICT sector did not get any incentives even as the panellists taking part in the webinar underlined that there should be more attention to the cottage industries and micro and small entrepreneurs and if they do not survive, achieving Bangladesh’s middle-income status will not go far.
