The Cost of a Signature

A licence to build a warehouse in the municipality of Guatemala requires, by our count, eleven signatures from seven offices. None of the offices is asked how long it took. We asked.

The median licence took 214 days from first filing to final stamp. The land, meanwhile, was financed at a commercial rate, the contractor was on retainer, and the tenant who had signed a letter of intent was reading it more carefully each month. We price the delay at roughly nine percent of the project's cost — a figure that, not coincidentally, matches the queue at Puerto Quetzal almost exactly.†

Guatemala's bottlenecks all charge the same rate, because they are all made of the same thing: unpriced time.

The offices are not malicious. They are unmeasured. Publish the clock, and the clock will shorten.

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† Sample figures; not independently verified.