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Change Your Life! |
UNCTAD-ICC
workshop for reliable investment guide |
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News |
April 18, 2000
Dhaka,
Apr 17 (UNB) - As an UNCTAD-ICC joint workshop began here today to prepare
a reliable and authentic investment guide for Bangladesh, private sector
leaders identified corruption and bureaucracy as hurdles standing in the
way of FDI. They
felt the other reasons that kept investors away despite Bangladesh’s
potentials and favourable policy support for investment must be detected
and remedies prescribed to attract more FDI which the country needs to
develop industries and widen exports. The
UNCTAD and the ICC-Bangladesh organised the two-day workshop, second and
last of the series that began last year, at Sonargaon Hotel to draft an
investment guide and FDI strategy for Bangladesh. UN
Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and International Chamber of
Commerce (ICC) took up a joint project on “Investment Guides and
Capacity-building for Least Developed Countries” to help the LDCs
attract more FDI. The
project is intended to provide prospective investors with objective and
up-to-date information on investment conditions in 48 LDCs that share only
0.5 per cent of world FDI inflows and build up investment-related capacity
to help them sustain in the face of a sharp decline of official
development assistance. The
joint project initially included Bangladesh and five African LDCs. Local
and foreign private sector leaders, experts and investment promotion
officials at the workshop will discuss the draft investment guide prepared
for Bangladesh after the first such workshop in Dhaka in November last
year. The
guide is likely to be finalised by June 2000 after incorporating the
feedback from the workshop. Inaugurating
the workshop, Board of Investment executive chairman M Mokammel Haque said
preparing investment guide is BOI’s routine work and the UNCTAD-ICC
joint project would enrich the Board’s activities. He
presented a brief scenario of investment in Bangladesh and stated that
Bangladesh’s policies and incentive packages for foreign investment were
the best in South Asia. ICC-Bangladesh
president Mahbubur Rahman said fast-track trade liberalisation and reforms
have not made any tangible impact on the economy, nor brought a good
response from foreign investors. “…as a result, the country became a
free-dumping ground of commodities from immediate neighbour and abroad,”
he said. He
added that Bangladesh must have an accelerated flow of investment to
offset the unfortunate situation. Rahman
said it is to be researched why Bangladesh, despite having resources,
cheap labour and good investment policy, could not be a favourable
destination for FDI, and what causes kept the investors at bay? The
ICC president said that although many obstacles had been removed, yet much
more would have to be done. Mentioning
the worries of intending investors, he identified many obstacles that
still exist in the way of FDI flow to Bangladesh. These include snags in
land procurement for industrial projects, inadequate infrastructure
facilities like electricity, gas and telecommunications, and corruption
and bureaucratic tangles. He also referred to the concern voiced by development partners at the April 13-14 Bangladesh Development Forum (BDF) meet in Paris and said: “We must do our homework first and quick.” Twenty-eight
global companies have lent their support for the UNCTAD-ICC project,
funded by five countries - China, Finland, France, India and Norway. UNCTAD project manager Vishwas P Govitrikar, underlining the importance of the workshop, said such a dialogue can bring about the conditions necessary to attract more FDI in an increasingly competitive global environment.
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