Bangladesh

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Bangladesh wants to invest $8 billion in infrastructure

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By Times of India and Reuters.

Bangladesh's government wants to invest $8 billion over the next few years in infrastructure to improve the economy and sought help from private sector to share the cost which the government could not bear alone.

SA Samad, the executive chairman of the state-run Board of Investment (BOI) highlighted the figure while meeting with business leaders from bilateral foreign chambers of commerce in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh wants to become a "middle income" country and to double export earnings to $50 billion by 2021.

The World Bank last June upgraded Bangladesh to a "lower middle income" country from a previous classification of 'least developed'.

"If government provides favourable support like credit from banks or issuing sovereign bonds then the private sector can come forward to invest," said Masud Rahman, president of Canada Bangladesh Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CanCham) Masud told Reuters after the meeting with Samad.

"Both government and private sectors are now quite capable of financing such investment." he added.

"We told to the chief executive of BOI that entrepreneurs can not reap benefit of country's attractive investment regime because of mainly lack of infrastructure that include roads and highways, ports, energy and gas," Masud said.

It was the first time that Bangladesh had organized a meeting between government and all bilateral foreign chambers.

Garments are a key foreign-exchange earner for the South Asian nation, whose low wages and duty-free access to Western markets have helped make it the world's second largest apparel exporter after China.