LIRNEasia » Honolulu

BOP mobile phone expenditure findings presented at PTC conference

Nirmali Sivapragasam — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:40:15 +0000

By Aileen Aguero, former Research Intern, LIRNEasia

As an intern at LIRNEasia, I had the opportunity of working with Harsha de Silva in writing a paper called Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) Expenditure Patterns on Mobile Phone Services in Selected Emerging Asian Countries. I presented this paper at the Pacific Telecommunications Conference, held on 17 – 20 January in Honolulu, Hawaii. The 2010 edition of this conference tried to emphasize the benefits innovation provides as well as the challenges faced by developing economies in connecting the unconnected and the adequate provision of systems and services.

Our paper was part of Breakout Session 7: Building for Sustainability – ICTs in the Developing World, held on 19 January (paper and slides available here). Elizabeth Fife, Bruce Baikie, Laina Reveendran and Laura Hosman were also part of this panel. The presentation included a discussion of the importance of mobile phone services in developing countries as well as the justification and objectives of this paper:

To study BOP mobile service expenditure patterns in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and the Philippines.
To determine if this service is a luxury or a necessity in economic terms.

The basic concepts of economics used in the analysis included Engel’s Law, the Engel curve and income elasticity. Along with the literature survey, the empirical analysis was explained, which included a graphical analysis of the Engel’s Law and the estimation of income elasticities. We showed that mobile phone services in the six countries had the characteristics of a necessary good, or in other words, the poorer the consumer, the larger the share of mobile expenditure relative to personal income. Findings revealed that income elasticities were below one for all countries under study, implying mobile services were regarded as necessities. The Philippines recorded the lowest income elasticity (0.1782) and India the highest (0.2640).

In conclusion, it was noted that mobile phone services were a part of everyday lives among the selected consumer group, and as such, authorities should try to limit the degree of taxation, which could hinder mobile use, particularly among the poorest poor. I also highlighted the need for more accurate data on expenditures and income to aid measurement of elasticities.

Questions were raised on the sample size used and the applicability of such an analysis in the context of small islands. I explained that our analysis could be applied to any country, and that the only issue would be data availability.

An important challenge this type of conference faces is catering to a diverse audience of operators and researchers with different interests. In this sense, our findings were highlighted as an example of what type of research needs to be done, as they are relevant from different perspectives.

The other panelists presented findings on project implementations in Haiti, Senegal (Laura and Bruce) and around the world (Laina). Laura and Bruce have been involved in OLPC projects while Laina currently works on Green ICTs.

PTC organizers look forward to more collaboration and interaction with LIRNEasia in future work.

Indian Ocean tsunami warning

Rohan Samarajiva — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 01:19:18 +0000

Indian Ocean tsunami warning system on slow track:

Tsunami Warning Remains Elusive – Council on Foreign Relations

The wave which swept so many away two years ago (BBC) has faded from memory in many parts of the world, even though as many as two million people remain in temporary shelters in parts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. But surely the less onerous task of setting up a skeletal tsunami warning network must be well along, right?Not quite. While enormous sums of aid flowed in for relief and reconstruction efforts, the less glamorous work of positioning seismic warning buoys around the rim of the Indian Ocean lags financially and organizationally. As this new Backgrounder explains, several piecemeal systems are up and running, but the goal of creating an Indian Ocean early-warning system to rival the ones run by the United States and Japan in the Pacific remains a long way from being reached (TIME). “Let’s not kid ourselves and think we’ve solved the warning problem,” says Laura Kong, head of the International Tsunami Information Center in Honolulu.

Trip Report, Honolulu, January 16-19, 2005

Rohan Samarajiva — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 07:11:43 +0000

The original purpose of the visit was to participate in a super session on Strategies for implementing universal access. The session was well attended and useful.

My presentation was Expanding Access to ICTs (Powerpoint)

Along with Bill Melodys forceful comments it clearly established the importance of market and regulatory reforms, a position that may otherwise have been deemphasized as a result of the Chairs interest in subsidies.

The visit was also used to pursue the disaster warning-communication issues that have come to the fore in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. On the 18th of January I visited the Big Islands Civil Defense Emergency Operations Center and the Pacific Tsunami Museum accompanied by Bill Melody and at the invitation of Dr George Curtis, a tsunami expert at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. On the following day, Peter Anderson, the expert we had recruited for the disaster warning work in Sri Lanka, and I visited the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center at Ewa Beach, Oahu. The information gathered in these visits was written up as Surviving tsunamis: Lessons we can learn from Hawaii. I am not attaching this article at this time because I hope to get it published in Sinhala and English in Sri Lanka shortly. This article has been circulated to contacts in tsunami-hit countries in the region as the first step in broadening the disaster warning-communication work.

On the 19th I made a plenary presentation (posted on website previously), What happened in Sri Lanka and why it wont be as bad next time. I was one of four speakers at the closing plenary of the PTC 05 conference. The plenary was well attended. I established useful relations with the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as a result of the plenary and the related contacts.

The PTC event itself did not live up to (possibly unrealistic) expectations. It had lost a lot of the government, academic and first-tier telco participation that it had back in 1990 when I last attended. There was a dearth of significant fund-raising or academic collaboration opportunities as a result. However, signaling the presence of LIRNEasia as a player in the Asia Pacific and the contacts related to the disaster warning-communication work made the trip worthwhile.

My talk on disaster warning in Honolulu

Rohan Samarajiva — Sat, 22 Jan 2005 11:41:11 +0000

I was on the closing plenary at the Pacific Telecom Council, with Peter Anderson (Simon Fraser University, Canada), Stuart Weinstein (Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, Honolulu, USA) and Charlie Kagami (Japan).

Plenary Talk Photo

The topic was “Disaster warning: how can we get it right the next time?”
The talk is What happened in Sri Lanka