Bangladesh spends a lot of energy explaining itself, to investors, multilateral lenders, and regional partners. The pitch is always the same: young population, low labour costs, strong export fundamentals. It is accurate and it is almost entirely besides the point. The countries that command respect in economic negotiations are not the ones with the best PowerPoint decks. They are the ones whose absence would cost someone else money.
Consider how leverage actually works in geopolitical and economic negotiations. When Vietnam pushed back on US trade conditions in the mid-2010s, it had something concrete behind it: billions in manufacturing exposure from US and Asian multinationals who needed Vietnamese supply chains to remain stable and open. When India negotiates with the IMF, it does so as a country where global capital has made substantial, illiquid bets. Leverage in diplomacy increasingly follows capital. Countries that have attracted deep, sticky foreign investment — the kind embedded in factories, financial investments, and supply chains with cascading effects — negotiate from a fundamentally different position than countries that are still an after-thought.
Bangladesh is still fighting to get on the radar, not because the opportunities are weak, but because the country’s playbook is outdated. Bangladesh attracted FDI equivalent to roughly 0.3 percent of its GDP in 2024, against Vietnam’s 4.2 percent and Indonesia’s 1.7 percent. The difference reflects a failure of narrative, coordinated outreach, and the feedback loops needed to translate strong fundamentals into opportunities that, over time, compound into policy reform and industrial development.
Bangladesh has largely assumed the fundamentals speak for themselves. They don’t. This matters beyond economics. Foreign investment creates stakeholders. Foreign investment is how smaller economies build the relationships that protect them, the leverage that gives them options, and the presence in global supply chains that makes them too costly to ignore. What Bangladesh has lacked is the recognition that attracting investment is not an economic priority with diplomatic benefits.
When a Malaysian conglomerate has a major manufacturing footprint in Bangladesh, the Malaysian government has a direct interest in Bangladesh’s political stability and market access. When European investors hold exposure to Bangladeshi bonds or equity, London becomes more attentive to Bangladesh’s interests in trade negotiations. Capital does not just flow into a country — it creates relationships and incentives that reshape how counterparties engage.
Bangladesh’s diplomatic relationships have historically been underutilised. The relationship with Malaysia is instructive: Bangladesh supplies nearly 40 percent of Malaysia’s foreign workforce and received $3.03 billion in remittances from Malaysia in 2024 alone, according to The Daily Star. Yet, Malaysia’s cumulative investment position in Bangladesh amounts to roughly $820 million built up over decades. Malaysia extracts labour; Bangladesh extracts remittances. Deepening Malaysian investment in manufacturing, infrastructure, halal supply chains would give Kuala Lumpur a reason to treat Dhaka as a partner rather than a labour supplier.
Bangladesh sits at one of the most strategically significant geographic intersections in Asia between South Asia and Southeast Asia. China, India, Japan, and the United States all have reasons to care about which direction Bangladesh chooses to face. That is genuine leverage. But leverage is only real when activated. Attracting capital from multiple competing powers creates the balanced exposure that gives a small country room to manoeuvre. Dependency on any single partner erodes that room. Diversified investment builds it.
The US tariff episode last year illustrated this gap in real time. When Bangladesh faced significant new tariffs on garment exports, what went unmobilised were the US corporate interests that stood to lose alongside it. Walmart, Target, and Gap source billions from Bangladeshi factories, and each has Washington lobbying operations that Bangladesh cannot match. BGMEA and the government had a ready-made coalition of US companies whose interests aligned precisely with Bangladesh’s. That coalition was barely activated. Bangladesh negotiated virtually alone.
Foreign corporate presence is not just an economic input. It is a political asset and countries that understand this build their investment strategies accordingly.
The BNP government’s 10 million jobs mandate creates a political opening to make this case domestically. Jobs require capital, capital requires foreign investment, and foreign investment requires institutional reforms that have been deferred for too long. What has been missing is the urgency to match the rhetoric.
Capital that does not come to Bangladesh goes somewhere else. To Vietnam. To Indonesia. To Pakistan. Every dollar that builds a factory elsewhere is a dollar that does not create a stakeholder in Bangladesh’s stability. The competition for foreign investment is not abstract. It is a competition for geopolitical relevance. FDI is a seat at the table, side by side with the countries that set the terms.
Rahat Ahmed is the founder and managing partner of Anchorless Bangladesh. He is also the co-founder of B/deshi, a global diaspora network connecting Bangladeshi professionals.
