The government is likely to set up a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) to speed up local and foreign investments in the country, sources at Board of Investment (BoI) told The New Nation yesterday. A senior official of Board of Investment said that the Council of Advisers of the caretaker government last month approved in principle the creation of a SEZ. He said the office of the Chief Adviser is now scrutinizing the final draft of a proposed "Special Economic Zone Ordinance-2008", under which a Special Economic Zone Authority would be established. The official said the SEZ, the first of its kind in Bangladesh, will be modeled after similar "successful" zones located in China, Vietnam, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan. He said the SEZ authority would oversee the development and plot allotments in the new exclusive industrial parks, which will be established on public-private partnership, in future in Bangladesh for more local and foreign investments. The BoI official said that unlike the existing publicly owned and managed Export Processing Zones (EPZs), a SEZ will be larger in scale and be linked to the domestic market. The first EPZ was set up in the country in 1983 and since then the country's eight EPZs have netted over 1.5 billion US dollars in investments, according to official statistics of the EPZ authorities. More than 283 industrial plants are now in operations at the EPZs, which provide employment opportunities to 2,20,000 workers. These industries exported various products worth 2.43 billion US dollars in 2007-08 fiscal year (July 2007-June 2008), which is more than 17 percent of the total export earning 14.11 billion US dollars.