Energy, banking and law and order investors’ top concerns

This excerpt is from ‘Zero Sum Game’, a talk show hosted by Shakhawat Liton, executive editor of TBS. The guest for this episode was Ashik Chowdhury, Chairman of Invest Bangladesh. Amid IMF and World Bank forecasts of slowing growth and stalled investment, he argued that weak investment is a symptom rather than the disease; the real causes being energy, banking and governance. He pointed to the World Bank’s governance indicators, on which Bangladesh trails every neighbour but Afghanistan and Pakistan, and set out a deregulation drive whose flagship pledge is to cut the year it takes to open an import letter of credit to 14 days.