One-Stop Shop or One-Stop Bottleneck
The sign says five days. The median is forty-three. The gap is not a staffing problem.
By Yaschin Mohabir · 3 August 2026 · 9 min read
Every special economic zone I have visited in the past decade displays the same laminated sign near the investor services desk: "One-Stop Shop." The sign is almost always accurate about the shop. It is almost never accurate about the stopping. The counter is real. The authority behind it usually is not. Until zone developers understand that distinction and fix it at the legal architecture level, investor services centres will keep producing the same outcome: a fast intake process followed by an invisible queue inside the ministries that nobody told about the five-day promise.
Every special economic zone I have visited in the past decade displays the same laminated sign near the investor services desk: "One-Stop Shop." The sign is almost always accurate about the shop. It is almost never accurate about the stopping. The counter is real. The authority behind it usually is not. Until zone developers understand that distinction and fix it at the legal architecture level, investor services centres will keep producing the same outcome: a fast intake process followed by an invisible queue inside the ministries that nobody told about the five-day promise.
The counter is real. The authority behind it usually is not.
When a one-stop shop fails, the instinct is to blame the people inside it. Hire better officers. Add a second shift. Build a digital portal. These fixes treat the symptom and leave the fracture untouched. The real problem is structural: a one-stop shop cannot, by legal design, make decisions on behalf of agencies that have not delegated authority to it. Most have not. The desk receives applications. It forwards them. It follows up. What it cannot do is approve them, because the ministries of labour, environment, commerce, and finance each retain sovereign sign-off rights that no zone authority, however well-resourced, can override by administrative fiat. This is the diagnosis that most zone benchmarking studies miss. They measure processing time and investor satisfaction scores. They do not measure the ratio of decisions actually made at the counter versus decisions that leave the counter and enter a separate agency queue. In my experience reviewing zone operating models across the Gulf and Southeast Asia, that ratio is rarely above 40 percent. The other 60 percent of approvals are still being made somewhere else, by someone who did not attend the ribbon-cutting. The World Bank's...
Most zone developers design the counter first and negotiate the delegation framework afterward, if at all
Most zone developers, including some I have reviewed in my work advising on zone strategy, design the investor services centre first and negotiate the delegation framework afterward, if at all. This sequencing is backward and it produces predictable results. The centre opens with fanfare. Early investors, often anchor tenants willing to absorb friction in exchange for low land rents, work through the system with dedicated case managers. The centre's success metrics look reasonable. Then scale arrives. Case managers are stretched. Forwarded applications pile up in ministry in-boxes. Approval timelines double. The zone's promotion material still says five days. The actual median is forty-three. Investors talk to each other. The gap between the promise and the median is not invisible. It circulates in investment banking deal rooms and in the site-selection reports that consultants prepare for multinationals. A zone that promises five days and delivers forty-three is not just slow. It is unreliable. Unreliability is more damaging than slowness, because slowness can be planned around and unreliability cannot. Once a zone acquires a reputation for process unreliability, reversing it req...
Start with the legal instrument, not the counter
If I were building a one-stop shop from scratch, I would start with the legal instrument, not the counter. Before any investor services centre opens, I would commission a complete map of every approval category an investor might need, trace each to its statutory authority, and negotiate a formal delegation schedule with each agency. That schedule would specify the decision type, the delegated officer grade, the binding turnaround, and the escalation pathway. It would be enacted by cabinet resolution, not agreed by letter between agency heads. The distinction matters: a cabinet resolution is legally enforceable. A letter is not. Second, I would design the digital platform as the system of record for all agencies simultaneously, not as a zone-facing portal that queries external systems. Every participating agency would access the same case file. The zone authority's case manager would see exactly what each agency sees and when they last viewed it. Accountability becomes impossible to obscure when the audit trail is shared. Bangladesh's BEZA learned this the hard way: its investor portal was built as a submission system that exported case data to agency in-boxes. Agencies processed t...
The question that should follow every counter announcement
The next time a zone authority unveils its one-stop shop, someone in the room should ask one question before the photograph is taken: how many of the approvals on that list are legally delegated to this counter, and what happens to the ones that are not? If the answer requires more than thirty seconds, the sign is premature. The counter is a piece of furniture. The delegation is the product. A zone that has built the furniture without securing the delegation has not built a one-stop shop. It has built a waiting room with a friendly receptionist and a queue that starts the moment the application leaves the desk. I have seen this pattern in zones across three continents. The ribbon-cutting happens. The promotional video is filmed. The zone authority's annual report records the number of applications processed through the centre. It does not record the number of applications that were approved at the centre versus forwarded to agencies. That distinction is the one that matters to investors, and it is the one that zone authorities are most reluctant to publish. Working inside a zone authority, I have pushed for a delegation audit as a precondition for any new investor services centr...