Bangladesh Bank has disclosed the country’s usable foreign exchange reserves for only the second time in two years but says it has no plan to publish the key indicator regularly, leaving markets and the public without consistent access to one of the most important measures of the country’s external financial position.
The central bank on Tuesday released its Net International Reserves (NIR), alongside the gross and BPM6 reserve figures, after calculating the latest position as of 7 July. According to the data, Bangladesh’s gross foreign exchange reserves stood at $36.52 billion, while reserves measured under the IMF’s BPM6 methodology were $31.87 billion, after settlement of $1.49 billion in Asian Clearing Union (ACU) import payments.
The NIR, which measures the country’s readily usable foreign exchange reserves after deducting short-term foreign liabilities and other encumbered assets, was also disclosed.
The publication marks only the second time Bangladesh Bank has publicly released its NIR. The first disclosure came on 2 July 2024, when the central bank announced an NIR of $16.77 billion, exceeding the IMF’s end-June target of $14.7 billion under the previous loan programme.
Although Bangladesh Bank has continued calculating and reporting the NIR to the IMF since then, it has not published the figure domestically for nearly two years.
The latest disclosure comes as Bangladesh prepares to negotiate a fresh IMF financing package.
However, Bangladesh Bank denied any link between Tuesday’s disclosure and the upcoming IMF programme.
“There is no connection between publishing the NIR and the forthcoming IMF programme,” Bangladesh Bank spokesperson Arief Hossain Khan told TIMES of Bangladesh.
“The NIR was calculated by the central and therefore it was shared with the media,” he added.
Asked whether the central bank would publish the usable reserve figure regularly in future, Arief said there was no plan to disclose it on a routine basis.
That means the country’s most important measure of usable foreign exchange reserves may continue to be withheld from public disclosure even though it is calculated regularly and reported to the IMF.
Unlike gross reserves, the NIR reflects the amount of foreign exchange immediately available for intervention or external payments after excluding liabilities and non-liquid reserve assets. The IMF uses the indicator as one of the principal benchmarks for assessing a country’s external liquidity position under its lending programmes.
The disclosure comes at a time when Bangladesh is seeking a new IMF financing arrangement after its previous $5.5 billion programme stalled.
