Bangladesh's investment bureaucracy just got smaller, at least on paper. On August 20, 2026, the government issued a gazette notification bringing the Invest Bangladesh Act, 2026 into force, formally dissolving three of the country's important economic institutions: the Bangladesh Investment Development Authority (BIDA), the Bangladesh Economic Zones Authority (BEZA), and the Public-Private Partnership Authority (PPPA); and folding them into a single new body called Invest Bangladesh.
Operating directly under the Prime Minister's Office, the new authority inherits the assets, staff, contracts, and liabilities of all three predecessor agencies, and is meant to give both domestic and foreign investors one front door instead of three.
While not a first, it can be called one of the most consequential reorganizations of Bangladesh's investment architecture since BIDA itself was created in 2016 by merging the old Board of Investment with the Privatisation Commission.
Bangladesh's FDI-to-GDP ratio sits at just 0.29–0.36%, the lowest in South Asia, and the government wants to raise annual FDI from roughly $1.7 billion to $15 billion by 2030.
Domestic private investment is also under pressure. The Dhaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry has flagged private investment falling to a decade low of 22.03% of GDP.
Fixing the investment bureaucracy is one lever among several the government is pulling to change that trajectory.
This also aligns with the broader economic agenda of the government that seeks to improve the regulatory landscape, private sector growth, and overall greater deregulation.
The official case for the merger is that fragmentation was costing Bangladesh investment. Ashik Chowdhury, who chaired BIDA and BEZA before becoming Invest Bangladesh's chairman, has described the old system as needlessly punishing for investors.
An entrepreneur moving between economic zones, export processing zones, and hi-tech parks effectively had to relearn the rules each time, dealing with different land prices, incentive structures, and approval processes as if crossing between six different countries. Chowdhury has also pushed back on the idea that centralizing power in one agency risks concentrating too much control, arguing that Bangladesh's problem was never too much central authority but too little coordination among semi-autonomous bodies each protecting its own turf.
In parliament, officials described the change as consolidation, combining overlapping mandates that had accumulated over a decade, rather than building something new.
The government has also pointed to external validation: Invest Bangladesh's chairman has said UNCTAD itself recommended unification along these lines following a review of Bangladesh's business-climate reforms.
Concretely, four laws are being retired and replaced by one: the BIDA Act 2016, the Bangladesh Economic Zones Act 2010, the Public-Private Partnership Act 2015, and the One Stop Service Act 2018 are repealed and their mandates consolidated under the new law, since renumbered as Act No. 104 of 2026.
The new authority combines BIDA's general investment-facilitation role, BEZA's management of economic zones, and PPPA's job of structuring public-private partnership deals into one statutory body with an eight-member leadership structure and a chairman who also serves as chief executive.
Functionally, the reform is meant to produce a few concrete things: statutory approval timelines, including a 14-day business-licensing target, a genuinely integrated digital platform (BanglaBiz) rather than separate portals per agency, and a single point of contact meant to follow an investor's project across its lifecycle, from market entry through site selection, zone allocation, and any PPP structuring involved.
On the ground, the transition will be gradual. The three legacy agencies continue functioning much as before in the near term; their roughly 300 staff are being absorbed into equivalent positions with protected benefits, and the full organizational structure is being built out in phases.
It is worth noting here that the scope actually narrowed between initial proposal and final law. Earlier in 2026, the interim government's original plan floated merging six bodies, adding the Bangladesh Export Processing Zones Authority (BEPZA), the Hi-Tech Park Authority, and the Maheshkhali Integrated Development Authority (MIDA) to the mix. What Parliament ultimately passed covers three. BEPZA and the Hi-Tech Park Authority remain outside Invest Bangladesh for now, so the "six countries" problem the reform was meant to solve has only partially been solved.
Bangladesh has tried a version of this before: the 2016 creation of BIDA was itself a merger, meant to fix a stagnant investment climate.
By most accounts, it didn't move the needle much. Privatisation stayed stalled, and investors kept complaining about multiplying, overlapping authorities. That history is the shadow hanging over Invest Bangladesh.
What's different this time is the political moment. The merger was initiated under an interim government pursuing a broader reform package, including a 180-day commitment to visible improvements in the ease of doing business, and passed into law with the explicit understanding that implementation would fall to whichever government follows.
However, institutional consolidation is easy to announce and hard to make matter, which is part of why this move is worth watching closely.
If it works as designed, the case for Invest Bangladesh is strong.
A single statutory framework removes a structural source of confusion for foreign investors comparing Bangladesh against regional peers.
Consolidated land, incentive, and approval rules across economic zones reduce the due-diligence burden on any single project.
A unified digital platform, if actually built out rather than left as another portal alongside the old ones, could meaningfully cut the paperwork costs that FICCI's own research identifies as a core barrier. Investors currently move across roughly 23 different government agencies over an investment's lifecycle, sometimes waiting up to a year for basic approvals.
A single accountable authority under the Prime Minister's Office also gives investors one clear point of political accountability instead of a diffuse web of agencies each able to point elsewhere.
The risks are just as real. The most frequently raised one, from a former BIDA executive chairman, is that the merger's success depends far less on the new org chart than on whether Invest Bangladesh gets real authority to fix problems that originate outside its own walls.
Many of the delays investors complain about sit with the National Board of Revenue, customs, the Department of Environment, and utility providers, none of which are being folded into Invest Bangladesh.
FICCI's own leadership has pointed to unresolved gas-supply problems inside existing economic zones and a 5% utility surcharge that undercuts the zones' cost advantage problems a merged front office doesn't by itself fix.
A Business Standard analysis argues Invest Bangladesh should be measured as a "National Investment Delivery Agency" that coordinates these downstream approvals on the investor's behalf, a considerably bigger mandate than the law currently gives it.
Similarly, while the current Chairman of Invest Bangladesh argues in favor of consolidation and sees consolidation as an alternative to better coordination, consolidation and centralization do slow things down, create greater risks for transparency and red tape, and other second-order consequences. It will be interesting to see how Invest Bangladesh deals with these challenges.
There are other straightforward execution challenges. The three legacy agencies are already understaffed, with 297 filled positions against 681 sanctioned, and absorbing staff from different institutional cultures while building a new organizational structure in phases is unglamorous work that determines whether mergers like this succeed or quietly stall. The narrowed three-agency scope also means the "too many doors" complaint hasn't fully been closed.
This is not a Bangladeshi thing. If anything, Bangladesh is late to this particular idea, not early. Malaysia's MIDA has operated as the country's principal investment agency since 1967 and runs a One Stop Centre where senior officials from customs, immigration, labour, and environmental agencies are physically stationed at MIDA's headquarters to clear approvals alongside MIDA itself, precisely the "coordinate the rest of government" role that critics say Invest Bangladesh still lacks.
Rwanda's Development Board is an even closer parallel: it was formed in 2008 by merging eight government institutions specifically to create a one-stop shop, reports directly to the Office of the President, and by 2023 had expanded its one-stop centre to issue all business and investment licences, not just its own, from a single location.
The common thread across both cases is that the merger itself was never the decisive factor. The critical factor was whether the resulting agency was given real authority to pull in other parts of government, sustained political backing across leadership changes, and enough operational capacity to make "one-stop" a reality rather than a rebrand.
Bangladesh's own experience with the 2016 BIDA merger is a cautionary data point on exactly that question.
A Business Standard commentary published just after the merger took effect makes the sharpest point yet about how to judge it. That success shouldn't be counted in roadshows, MoUs, or investor inquiries, but in how much investment actually gets realized: new factories built, capital deployed, jobs created.
Invest Bangladesh gives the country a structure that finally resembles what its peers built years ago. Whether it also gets the authority, the staffing, and the follow-through those peers eventually managed is the question the next few years will answer.
