Myanmar wants to foster manufacturing sector development by linking to both special economic zones (SEZs) and domestic industrial zones. “Local investors and factory owners are able to have the benefit of technology transfer, business experience and techniques for infrastructure development and financing if the SEZs very well provide a good fundamental and experimentation,” said Ko Ko Lwin, permanent secretary Ministry of Industry. “We have 30 local industrial zones across the country and 11 of them are in Yangon Region but the growth rate of the manufacturing sector is significantly going down. Developers failed to properly operate factories despite receiving land from the government in the industrial zones. This is one of the primary factors behind the failure of the government’s importsubstitution and export-promotion strategy. Myanmar’s manufacturing sectors roughly made up 20 per cent of the GDP in 2016 – with 2.2 billion Kyats from garment exports, according to the ministry’s statistics. Unfortunately, slowdown in economic growth has affected the manufacturing sector. The government expects to have at least 25 to 30 per cent of the GDP from the manufacturing sector in the near future, Ko Lwin added.
