Dhaka : The chief of the Bangladesh Investment Development Authority (BIDA) has said India’s stunning success in the ease of doing business ranking indicates that Bangladesh can also pull it off.
“We have to improve a lot. And we are working for that,” Executive Chairman Kazi M Aminul Islam said on Tuesday.
He said this improvement is necessary for the massive investments needed for the “transformation” of Bangladesh to be a developed country by 2041 which would be a $3 trillion economy.
“We have made a lot of progress, no doubt about it. If we really want the transformation, we have to have massive improvement. For that we are working on ease of doing business.
“India has done pretty well that indicates we can also do the same.”
The BIDA chief was speaking at the American Chamber of Commerce in Bangladesh’s (AmCham) monthly luncheon meeting at The Westin Dhaka Hotel.
A panel discussion was held in that meeting on “Economic Outlook of Bangladesh”.
Country Director of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) Manmohan Parkash, Director of the Bangladesh Institute of Governance and Management and former finance secretary Mohammad Tareque, and Member of the Board of Directors of Bangladesh Bank and former president of AmCham Aftab-ul-Islam spoke as the panelists.
AmCham President Md Nurul Islam conducted the discussion. Apart from the BIDA executive chairman, President of FBCCI Md Shafiul Islam Mohiuddin also spoke at the discussion.
According to the latest ranking released recently, India has climbed 23 positions to rank 77 among the 190 countries in the World Bank’s doing business report.
Bangladesh languishes at 176, which is just one position up from the last year.
India has improved its rank by 53 points in the last two years, a jump that has not been achieved by any economy comparable with it in size and scale.
Bangladesh under the BIDA for the first time launched reform initiatives to improve the ranking in 2017.
The BIDA chief said despite the low score, “the good news is that if we could achieve more than 7 percent growth, a little bit improvement will take Bangladesh to double digit growth that we are looking for and working for”.
The ADB country director said they are happy to see Bangladesh’s progress.
“Bangladesh is on the right path. Bangladesh is doing the right thing. Resilience of the people, continuity of the public policy, and political stability are the hall marks of goods developments,” he said.
The ADB recently launched country operations business plan or COBP from 2019 to 2021 for Bangladesh.
