Bangladesh is expected to establish a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) to speed up local and foreign investments in the country, an official said here Sunday.

Executive member of Bangladesh's Board of Investment (BoI) Abu Reza Khan told Xinhua on Sunday that the advisory council of the country's caretaker government led by Chief Adviser Fakhruddin Ahmed last month approved in principle the creation of a SEZ.

He said the office of the chief advisor is now scrutinizing the final draft of a proposed "Special Economic Zone Ordinance-2008", under which a Special Economic Zone Authority would be established.

Abu Reza said the SEZ, the first of its kind in Bangladesh, will be modeled after similar "successful" zones located in China, Vietnam, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan.

He said the SEZ authority would oversee the development and plot allotments in the new exclusive industrial parks, which will be established on public-private partnership, in future in Bangladesh for more local and foreign investments.

He said that unlike the existing publicly owned and managed Export Processing Zones (EPZs), a SEZ will be larger in scale and be linked to the domestic market.

Bangladesh set up its first EPZ in 1983 and since then its eight EPZs have netted over 1.5 billion U.S. dollars in investments, according to official statistics of the country's EPZ authority.

Bangladesh's EPZs are now home of more than 283 industrial plants, which have created jobs for 220,000 workers.

These factories exported various products worth 2.43 billion U.S. dollars in 2007-08 fiscal year (July 2007-June 2008), which is more than 17 percent of the total export earning 14.11 billion U.S. dollars.

(CCTV.com)