Export Processing Zones (EPZs) in Bangladesh created employment opportunities for 45,000 in the year 2006 as against 43,000 in the previous year. Forty-eight factories came forward to invest in EPZs during the year with an investment of US$376 million. Twenty-one of them were fully foreign, eight were joint-venture and remaining 19 were hundred per cent domestic owned . In 2005, EPZs attracted US$193 million and the growth registered to 95 per cent in 2006.

Despite a number of ordeals including the political instability since the middle of 2006, high cost of doing business and red-tapism at the Chittagong EPZ created employment opportunities for 21,000 persons during the last few months of 2006 and this figure is expected to rise sharply in the coming months.

If congenial and conducive atmosphere prevail and cost of doing business reduce and bureaucratic tangles remove it is expected that investment both in EPZs and outside the EPZs in 2007 will increase further.