On the Efficiency of 'Single Window'

Athreya, Krishna B.; Bishnu, Monisankar

Economic Theory Vol. 43 no. 2 (2010): 207-226.

In many countries, the process of obtaining government approval for different projects involves interaction with multiple government agencies at various levels. This often makes the approval process inefficient by unnecessary lengthening it. In this paper we study the effect of a re-organization of the approval process towards making it a single window clearance system, on the efficiency of the entire process. We have used the expected queue length and the expected waiting time in the system at the stochastic steady state as measures of inefficiency of an approval system.

JEL Classification: D61, D73, O10, O17

Keywords: Inefficiency, Single Window policy, Stochastic equilibrium, queueing

Published Version