Bangladesh's recurrent slippage in the World Bank's country policy and institutional assessment (CPIA) ratings risks continuity of the Bank's support for the country, says its report that is yet to be made public.       

The CPIA report is learnt to have cited mainly poor performance in structural policy, public-sector management and institutional reforms, while its one official finds 'fragile democracy' as a drawback.

The Washington-based global development financier, in its CPIA report, shows Bangladesh's score in "Structural policies" having slipped to 3.3 out of total 6.0 in the last calendar year, 2016, from its highest achievement of 3.5 in 2009.

In "Public sector management and institutions" cluster, the country score plunged to 2.8 in 2016 from a peak of 3.0 in 2007.

The score (2.8) is even lower than the average score (3.0) of the WB borrowing countries, the Bank in its report said.

The Bank shared the findings in the CPIA 2016 report with Bangladesh government recently.

An official at the WB Dhaka office told the FE that if Bangladesh could not improve upon its CPIA ratings, its financial and other supports from the multilateral financier could be affected in the near future.

"How much we will extend our cooperation to a particular country depends on the CPIA report. If Bangladesh does well in the report, its support definitely will be improved. However, if the CPIA report shows Bangladesh's performance bad, WB's future support will be affected," he said, requesting anonymity as the CPIA report is yet to be published.

The WB assesses its borrowing countries' performance against a set of 16 criteria grouped into four clusters: economic management; structural policies; policies for social inclusion and equity; and public-sector management and institutions.

Concessional loans and grants from WB's soft window -- the International Development Association (IDA) -- are allocated to a country on per-capita terms based on its IDA country-performance rating and, to a limited extent, based on its per-capita gross national income (GNI).

The lender said this ensures that good performers receive a higher IDA allocation in per-capita terms. The IDA Resource Allocation Index (IRAI) is a key element in the country-performance ratings.

WB's IRAI is based on the results of the annual CPIA exercise, which covers the IDA-eligible countries.

Country assessments have been carried out annually since the mid-1970s by World Bank staff. Over time the criteria have been revised from a largely macroeconomic focus to include governance aspects and a broader coverage of social and structural dimensions, the WB said.

The WB official further told the FE that Bangladesh is still far behind from improving the structural policy as its trade liberalisation, financial-sector reform and its governance, and business-regulatory environment are still weak in position.

The business-regulatory environment is weaker than many other WB- member countries, affecting trade and investment here, the official said quoting the latest CPIA report.

Similarly, in its view, Bangladesh has been continuously doing worse over the years in property rights and rule-based governance, quality of budgetary and financial management, efficiency of revenue mobilisation, quality of public administration, and transparency, accountability and corruption in the public-sector categories.

"Bangladesh has a scope to improve its scores in those categories. But the weak and fragile democracy is creating hindrance to the upgradation of the country's ranking," he said.

Meanwhile, Bangladesh has done comparatively better in two other clusters: economic management and policies for social inclusion/equity.

In the two clusters, Bangladesh has scored 4.0 and 3.5 respectively. The scores are higher than the average scores of 3.4 and 3.2 respectively among all the member-countries of the global lender in the CPIA report 2016.