Competing for the Same 200 Multinationals

By Yaschin Mohabir · 28 September 2026 · 8 min read

Every SEZ authority on the planet is flying to the same cities, knocking on the same doors, and pitching the same deck. If your zone's pitch mentions tax holidays, one-stop shops, and strategic location, you have already lost. The race is not close. It is not even interesting.

The Race You Are Losing Without Knowing It

Every SEZ authority on the planet is flying to the same cities, knocking on the same doors, and pitching the same deck. The deck has a slide titled "Why Invest Here." That slide mentions a zero or low corporate tax rate, a one-stop shop for licensing, a strategic location at the intersection of major trade routes, and world-class infrastructure. If that description fits your zone's pitch, you are in a race with 5,400 other zones, and you are competing on the variables that matter least to the investors you most want to attract. The SEZ model was built for a different era. In the 1980s and 1990s, a zero-percent corporate tax rate was genuinely differentiating. The supply of credible zones was limited. The demand for low-cost export platforms was growing fast. A zone that could offer tax relief, basic infrastructure, and a functioning port could attract capital from manufacturers looking for cost arbitrage. That model worked because the alternatives were scarce and the bar was low. Today, according to UNCTAD's World Investment Report 2023, there are over 5,400 SEZs operating across 147 countries.1 Every serious one offers a tax package. Most offer streamlined licensing. A significa...

What the Data Actually Shows

The evidence on what drives multinational investment decisions is sharper than most zone authorities want to acknowledge. The World Bank's 2022 Global Investment Competitiveness Report surveyed multinationals across a range of industries and geographies on their investment location criteria.2 The results are unambiguous. Political stability and the legal and regulatory environment consistently ranked higher than fiscal incentives as determinants of investment location. Only 31 percent of firms cited tax incentives as a primary driver. Regulatory quality and rule of law ranked first for over 60 percent of respondents. This is not a new finding. The academic literature on investment location decisions has been pointing in the same direction for two decades. Dunning's OLI framework, developed in the 1970s and refined through the 1990s, identified ownership advantages, location advantages, and internalisation advantages as the three determinants of where multinationals invest.3 Tax rates appear in the location advantage category, but they sit alongside regulatory quality, infrastructure, market access, and institutional stability. The empirical work that followed Dunning consistently ...

Where the Budget Is Going and Why That Is the Problem

Zone developers and policymakers are allocating resources in the wrong direction. The typical zone promotion budget skews heavily toward events, road shows, and marketing materials. The typical zone improvement budget skews toward physical infrastructure and headline incentive sweeteners. Almost nothing goes toward the instruments that actually move CFO decisions: legal certainty, operational friction reduction, and institutional credibility. This misallocation is not irrational from the perspective of the people making the budget decisions. Events and road shows produce visible activity. A new incentive package produces a press release. Physical infrastructure produces a ribbon-cutting ceremony. These are all things that can be reported to a minister or a board as evidence of progress. Building a track record of fair dispute resolution, or redesigning the investor onboarding process around the CFO's risk checklist, or publishing a conversion rate from signed MOU to financial close, none of these produce a ribbon-cutting moment. They produce credibility, which is harder to measure and slower to accumulate. The competitive consequence of this misallocation compounds over time. Eve...

What I Would Do Differently

Having sat on the authority side of these negotiations, I can tell you exactly what I would change, because the gap between what zones pitch and what investors actually need is visible from both sides of the table. First, I would stop measuring the zone's attractiveness by the number of incentive tools in the toolkit and start measuring it by the time it takes an investor to get a definitive answer to a complex regulatory question. Not an acknowledgment. An answer. That metric, tracked publicly and compared to peer zones, tells the market more about operational quality than any incentive brochure ever will. If your zone takes 45 days to answer a complex question about land tenure and your competitor takes 5, no tax package closes that gap. Second, I would redesign the investor onboarding process around the CFO's risk checklist, not the zone's approval workflow. Most zones are organised to satisfy internal bureaucratic logic. The investor moves through a sequence of approvals that makes sense to the zone authority and is opaque to the investor. I would reorganise around the investor's decision sequence, which means leading with legal certainty documentation, dispute resolution fra...

The Question That Tells You Everything

I want to end with a question I ask every zone director I meet, because the answer tells me everything about whether they understand the competition they are actually in. If a multinational investor in your zone had a serious contractual dispute with a local partner tomorrow, and the dispute went to your zone's legal mechanism rather than an offshore arbitration centre, would the investor's general counsel feel safer or more exposed? If you hesitated before answering, you already know what your real differentiator problem is. And no incentive package fixes it. The zones that win the next decade of investment competition will not be the ones with the most generous tax packages. They will be the ones that can answer that question with confidence, and then show an investor the track record that backs it up. That is a harder thing to build than a fiscal incentive framework. It is also the only thing that is genuinely difficult to replicate.