That has been reflected through recasting of tax holiday provisions, continuation of a number of cash incentive schemes for selected export sectors and rationalisation of tariff and para-tariff structures.

He said there are some ‘not so pro-poor trends’ in the public finance basket. These are: revenue expenditure increasing at a rate faster than that of revenue earnings and development expenditure, increased contribution of the VAT in incremental contribution to the total revenue intake and extremely poor level of utilization of resources allocated to some of the social sectors which essentially benefit the rural poor.

CPD identified ‘eight sins’ in this new budget, listing them as follows:
i)Bloated public investment programme
ii) Adverse selection of projects and programmes
iii) Tendentious award of tax and tariff relief
iv) Contracting of questionable suppliers credit
v) Patronage distribution through public procurement
vi) Patronage distribution through privatization of state-owned enterprises
vii) Issuance of new bank licences
viii) Issuance of new insurance licences

CPD observed that achieving over 6 percent GDP growth would not be so much significant for Bangladesh as South Asian countries including India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka posted similar scale of GDP growth.

Referring to the economic growth rate of India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka which posted 6.5, 6.5 and 7 percent respectively in last fiscal year, Dr Bhattacharya said, "It seems South Asia as a whole is going through a spell of relatively high growth. It is the big challenge for Bangladesh how long it could go with this pace."

He said that the main weakness of this growth is that it came from service sector not from industry, mining and labour oriented sectors.
For Bangladesh, it is not good to achieve the growth from service sector as it would not generate new employment, he pointed out.

About the rising of per-capita income, he said that there is nothing to celebrate it as Bangladesh still lagged behind most of the South Asian countries.

Regarding the investment, CPD said that Bangladesh continues to remain an under- invested country while its national savings rate (26.49 percent) remains higher than the gross investment rate (24.43 percent).

"The lowest government development expenditure was recorded in 2004-05 fiscal year," Bhattacharya said adding, "There is a thin interest in the government for not implementing the entire ADP to maintain the balance between the government’s income and expenditure."

About the allocation in defense budget, he said publicly the government did not expand defense budget in a major scale. But he apprehended that the defense expenditure might be increased through different ministries.
He blasted the brief content of the budget speech of Finance Minister this year where most of the issues were not clearly mentioned. He said, "Fairness of the budget was thus erased."

However, CPD Executive Director hailed the government’s allocation for education, public service, agriculture, tax holiday, fisheries and livestock sector, rural development, agro-processing and agro-based industries.