The government has initiated a move to revise the existing industrial policy, with special focus on privatisation and attracting foreign direct investment.
"This policy will contain a few new concepts including declaration of some fresh industrial sectors, particularly on the small and medium enterprise (SME) category," industries secretary Mosharraf Hossain Bhuiyan said.
He was addressing a workshop Monday at the BRAC Centre in the capital as chief guest.
BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD) in association with the RAND Corporation (USA) and University of Sussex (UK) organised the brainstorming workshop on 'Labour Market and Growth'.
Regarding the privatisation, the secretary said the government has planned to allocate unused land for private industries in order to ensure maximum utilisation of the land.
"We've identified that all the state-run industrial enterprises have a vast tract of unused land. Therefore, we've decided to allocate the land to the private entities or foreign investors," the secretary said.
He said the government is also working to make the state-owned enterprises profitable. "We've taken some measures including foreign assistance in the form of joint-venture projects to make the government enterprises 'profitable'," he added.
He said some renowned local and foreign development partners have already expressed their interests to work jointly to this effect.
"However, although presently the state-run enterprises mostly count financial losses, these are helping a large group of people involved with the units," he added.
The workshop is the part of the two projects funded by DFID, IZA and ESRC to study the formal and informal labour market nexus and growth and to study the effects of disinvestment in public sector enterprises in the countries in South-East Asia, including Bangladesh.
The workshop aimed at soliciting the input from academics, researchers and policy-makers so that direction of the research can be shaped in such a way that can be most useful to policy-makers and others concerned with labour markets and industrial policy.
The research team includes Dr Minhaj Mahmud and Farzana Munshi of BIGD, Dr Krishna Kumar and Dr Shanthi Nataraj of BRAC University, and Dr Italo Gutierrez of RAND and Dr Amalavoyal Chari of University of Sussex.
BRAC University Vice Chancellor Prof Syed Saad Andaleeb, Member of the Planning Commission Arastoo Khan, Prof MA Sattar Mandal of Bangladesh Agricultural University, Prof Mustafizur Rahman of Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), Prof Selim Raihan of Dhaka University, Simeen Mahmud of BIGD and Dr Rushidan Islam Rahman, Dr Kazi Ali Toufique and Dr Nazneen Ahmed of BIDS, among others, attended the discussion.
The workshop was chaired by Dr Sultan Hafeez Rahman, Executive Director of BIGD. The research has been funded by Department for International Development (DFID) and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
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