Lending to Bangladesh's private sector has slipped to 34.5% of GDP

Domestic credit to the private sector in Bangladesh stood at 34.5% of GDP in 2025, down from 40.4% in 2017 and 39.2% in 2020, the World Bank’s World Development Indicators show.

40.4% → 34.5%

Domestic credit to the private sector as a share of GDP, 2017 to 2025.

The measure covers loans, purchases of non-equity securities and trade credits that financial corporations provide to private firms and households. It has fallen every year since 2020 (39.2%), including 37.6% in 2023 and 35.8% in 2024. Over the same period consumer-price inflation was high: 9.9% in 2023, 10.5% in 2024 and 8.8% in 2025 on the same World Bank series, while GDP per person grew 2.2% in 2025, down from 6.0% in 2022.

The data coincide with these pressures but do not show what drove the fall. Credit can shrink as a share of GDP because lending slows, because GDP in current prices grows faster than loans, or because of banks’ own balance-sheet problems. For policy, the figure is a prompt to ask whether small and medium enterprises, which typically depend on bank finance, can borrow enough to invest and create jobs.

One caveat: the series steps down between 2015 (44.4%) and 2016 (37.8%), so the chart starts in 2016 to keep like-for-like years.

Source: IMF International Financial Statistics, World Bank and OECD data, via World Bank WDI (FS.AST.PRVT.GD.ZS).