Ghana and Bangladesh Rewrote Their Investment Agency Laws on the Same Day

President John Dramani Mahama assented to the Ghana Investment Promotion Authority Act, 2026 (Act 1173) on July 15, 2026, converting the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre into the Ghana Investment Promotion Authority. The same day in Dhaka, the Jatiya Sangsad passed the Invest Bangladesh Bill, 2026. Ghana kept one agency and changed what it can demand. Bangladesh took four agencies and made them one.

The Bangladesh law folds the Bangladesh Investment Development Authority, the Bangladesh Economic Zones Authority, the Bangladesh Hi-Tech Park Authority, and the Public-Private Partnership Authority into a single statutory body, and repeals five statutes to do it, including the One Stop Service Act, 2018, according to The Daily Star's report of the parliamentary session on July 16, 2026. A board chaired by the prime minister or a nominee sits above it. Salahuddin Ahmed, the minister in charge of the Prime Minister's Office who moved the bill, told the House: “We are simply merging these authorities into one.” The government's own framing is administrative.

That framing understates what the law contains, and the understatement is instructive. Buried past the merger clauses, the Bangladesh law lets the new authority set deadlines for government services attached to approved projects, naming land allocation, utility connections, customs clearance, and environmental approvals, and requires every relevant agency to work through one digital platform. None of those four services belongs to any of the four merged agencies. Ghana's Act 1173 reaches for the same thing by a different route: a statutory investor grievance mechanism covering an administrative decision, act, or omission by any government institution, with complaints admissible within six months, acknowledgment due within five days, and unresolved matters reported quarterly to the Office of the President. In both statutes, the operative provision concerns the agencies the reform does not touch.

Bangladesh has already run the merger experiment once. On September 1, 2016, the Privatisation Commission and the Board of Investment were combined into a single agency under the Bangladesh Investment Development Authority Act, 2016, and privatization stayed stalled afterward, as The Daily Star noted in its July 20, 2026 assessment. The arithmetic problem is also on the record: M Masrur Reaz, chairman and chief executive of Policy Exchange Bangladesh, puts the number of public institutions holding investment-related services above 50. A merger of four leaves the rest untouched. Md Sirazul Islam, a former executive chairman of BIDA, told the same paper that success will depend less on the merger than on whether the agency has enough authority to solve investors' problems.

Ghana spent its statute differently, on rules an investor meets at the door. Act 1173 removes the blanket minimum capital thresholds that Act 865 imposed since 2013: US$200,000 for a joint venture with Ghanaian participation and US$500,000 for a wholly foreign-owned enterprise both go to zero. Trading enterprises keep a floor, cut from US$1,000,000 to US$500,000 in cash equity, now paired with a requirement that at least 75% of the workforce be skilled Ghanaians in place of the old fixed count of 20, on the reading by Bentsi-Enchill, Letsa & Ankomah published April 27, 2026. Automatic expatriate quotas rise from a cap of four to a schedule reaching 12 for enterprises capitalized above US$10 million. The Act adds friction too: registration now renews annually rather than every two years, so Ghana bought its escalation route by creating a recurring compliance event.

The strongest objection is not that mergers fail. It is that a legal escalation route is worth exactly what the escalated-to office does with it. Ghana's quarterly grievance report lands at the Office of the President, and if nobody there acts on it, the mechanism is a filing requirement with a five-day clock attached. Concede the merger case as well: the coordination fight between BIDA and BEZA over industrial land was real, it is now internal, and Ashik Chowdhury already holds the executive chairmanship of both bodies plus the chief executive role at PPPA, so the law formalizes an arrangement one person occupies. The falsifier is dated and cheap to check. Bangladesh's law takes effect on a date the government sets by gazette notification. If that notification arrives without implementing rules naming a deadline for each service and a consequence for missing it, then the merger was the whole reform and this reading of the statute is wrong. The gazette date has not been announced. In Accra, Simon Madjie's authority owes the Office of the President its first quarterly list of grievances it could not resolve.