Bangladesh International Investment Summit in Nov to attract FDI

19 Sep '21

2 min read

Pic: Shutterstock/Pinar Alver

With a dismally stagnating investment and foreign direct investment hovering around $2.5 billion annually, Bangladesh will hold a summit in November to attract investors where the Bangladesh Investment Development Authority (BIDA) will highlight the steps taken over the last five years to improve the investment climate and ease of conducting business.

The Bangladesh International Investment Summit will be the second after the first took place in 2016. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is likely to inaugurate the event virtually.

Analysts, however, say organizing such a summit may not suffice to pull foreign investors in the absence of proper implementation of laws related to investment. Effective one-stop service facilities are needed too to lure investments from abroad, they say.

Development of regional connectivity, port and infrastructure facilities is needed to give a boost to the confidence of investors that they would be able to connect with the global value chain smoothly, analysts say.

At a recent press conference, Salman F Rahman, private industry and investment affairs adviser to the prime minister, said Bangladesh is yet to fully utilise the investment environment that had been created in recent years. The country’s investment-to-GDP ratio is the lowest in South Asia.

"Bangladesh needs FDI to increase the investment-to-GDP ratio to expedite the GDP growth," he said, adding that the summit would attempt to attract foreign investors and Bangladeshi expatriates, according to Bangla media reports.

In recent years, though the ratio of public investment to GDP has shown an increasing trend, private investment has been stagnating.

In fiscal 2020-21, the private investment-to-GDP ratio declined to 21.25 per cent from 22.06 per cent in the previous fiscal, according to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS). The ratio was 23.5 per cent in fiscal 2018-19 when the country received FDI worth $3.89 billion, the highest on record.

However, the pandemic adversely affected the growth of investment as in fiscal 2019-20, and the country could attract only $2.37 billion, down by 39 per cent from a year ago. It stood at $1.96 billion in the nine months to March of the last fiscal.

BIDA said the investment scenario has been favourable in Bangladesh and investors were optimistic until the pandemic.

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