Opening a new frontier in Bangladesh

Bangladesh usually attracts attention for the wrong reasons. Too often the country appears in news headlines for its natural or man-made disasters, or else it is dismissed as a source of employment for NGOs or cheap labour for the garment industry.

Yet, as long ago as 2005, Goldman Sachs named Bangladesh as one of its “Next 11” countries, which also included South Korea and Indonesia, for its promising investment and growth outlook. And the Japan Bank for International Cooperation ranked the country as the 16th most attractive investment destination in 2011.

Indeed, Bangladesh has enjoyed a decade of sustained improvement in its macroeconomic indicators, as Fazle...