The TRE methodology is based on the assumption that investment is a necessary condition for good telecom sector performance, and investment decisions are influenced by perceptions of investment risk. Using interviews and a questionnaire administered to a statistically significant cross-section of industry stakeholders and experts, the TRE assessment traverses six dimensions of regulatory risk for both the fixed and mobile sectors.

The new report, the second assessment of Peru’s regulatory environment, reports that the overall influence of the regulatory environment in Peru has improved since the previous assessment (2006-2007) but remains neutral – neither encouraging nor discouraging investment. There is positive movement in the perception of market entry regulation, but also a perception that improvements are required in regulation governing anti-competitive practices.

Read the summary in English and download the full report (Spanish only)

Since 2006 DIRSI and LIRNE.NET have conducted TRE assessment studies in six countries in the Latin America and Caribbean region (Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru and Uruguay).

Travel scholarships are available on a competitive basis.

Click here for more information.

In the three months through March, the company said its profit declined to 122 million euros ($162.3 million) from 1.2 billion euros a year earlier. Sales fell 27 percent, to 9.3 billion euros from 12.7 billion euros.

The number of cellphones sold fell 45 percent in Latin America, 31 percent in North America and 27 percent in Africa and the Middle East. Elsewhere, the pace of decline was more moderate — 13 percent in Europe, 15 percent in China and 17.3 percent in the rest of Asia.

Nokia reiterated its expectation that industry sales would decline 10 percent this year from 2008.

Full story here.

Some Cubans already own mobile phones, but they have had to acquire them via a third party, often foreigners.

Cuba’s rate of cell phone usage remains among the lowest in Latin America.

Now Cubans will be able to subscribe to pre-paid mobile services under their own names, instead of going through foreigners or in some cases their work places. However, the new service must be paid for in foreign currency, which will restrict access to wealthier Cubans.

Read the full story in BBC here.

DIRSI’s study on mobile price and affordability also adapts the OECD price baskets to compare the monthly costs of using mobiles in six Latin American countries. The Latin American baskets take into consideration call and SMS volumes and usage data as specified in the OECD methodology,[5] but excludes initial connection charges. The DIRSI study also does not report data on postpaid or indicate whether different MoUs have been applied to prepaid and postpaid.

Despite differences in methodology, it is interesting to note the rather large differences in the monthly costs between users in South Asia and Latin America; even though the former takes into account a broader set of costs. Table 1 shows that a low user in Afghanistan (who pays the most in South Asia) is still paying approximately half that paid by a low user in the cheapest of the Latin American countries studied (Argentina) when comparing the findings in straight USD. In Purchasing Power Parity terms (which reflect affordability), the differences are still dramatic.

Using interviews and a questionnaire administered to a statistically significant cross-section of industry stakeholders and experts, the TRE assessment traverses six dimensions of regulatory risk (market entry, access to scarce resources, interconnection, tariff regulation, regulation of anti-competitive practice and universal service) for both the fixed and mobile sectors.

The TRE methodology focuses on the environment as a whole, rather than only on the regulatory agency. This broadens the scope and usefulness of the study to different actors.

DIRSI and LIRNE.NET are currently undertaking TRE studies in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. The Latin American TRE researchers are using the beta version of a TRE Toolkit developed by LIRNEasia – and making suggestions for its improvement and development, especially from a cross-cultural perspective.

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Two sessions will be based on the LIRNEasia‘s study on Teleuse at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP), which is to presented in the form of an interactive quiz show. The background paper is available here.

A session titled ‘Making Communities Disaster Resilient’, hopes to highlight issues related to developing a robust solution for strengthening community resilience in the face of natural disasters. The background paper is available here.

LIRNE researchers will also be among panelists at a session on regulatory transparency and effectiveness. The session, entitled ‘Hello Regulator’, hopes to explore how having easy access to regulatory information and processes can support community and public agendas, access to ICT and so forth.

Click here for further information available on the GKP website.

 ————

PDF versions of related background papers from other regions can be accessed here:

Genderstanding Mobile Telephony: Women, Men and their Use of Cellular Phones in Jamaica. (DIRSI)

Mobile Opportunities: Poverty and Telephony Access in Latin America and the Caribbean. (DIRSI)

Towards an African ICT e-Index: Towards evidence based ICT policy in Africa (Research ICT Africa)

Title: Diversifying Participation in Network Development: Case studies and research from WDR Research Cycle 3
Editors: Amy Mahan and William H. Melody
Document date: September 2007
Pages: 230

The book is divided into three sections. The first, entitled Affordability and Use, opens with a study on affordability – definitions, analysis and issues. This is followed by two demand side studies, the first focusing on mobile use by the poor; and the second assessing communication expenditures across four developing countries. The final chapter in this section reports on a survey of ICT use by SMEs in eight African countries.

Section 2, Models to Extend Participation in Network Development considers microfinance, smart subsidies, community owned microtelcos and the extension of research networks. The countries used to highlight these alternative approaches include Bangladesh, Nepal, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Ghana.

Section 3, Regulatory and Information Practices, begins with two chapters dedicated to the information provision and communication practices of regulators – which are important for cultivating informed participation in regulatory processes. Next regional regulation in support of national regulators and to ensure competitive markets is examined using the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States as a case study. Further perspective on this is provided by a chapter on multinational operators in African mobile markets. The section concludes with a case study on the regulatory environment in Guyana.

This report is the third in a series of research cycles that WDR is undertaking to assess different approaches to regulation in a rapidly changing telecom environment. With the advent of privatisation, competition, and converging infrastructure sectors, the role of the regulator is in a transitional phase. The first World Dialogue on Regulation research cycle assessed two emerging regulatory trends and the report, The Next Step in Telecom Reform: ICT Convergence Regulation or Multisector Utility Regulation; and the second cycle, Stimulating Investment in Network Development: Roles for Regulators – are both available for download and hardcopies of the second can be ordered from WDR.

Diversifying Participation in Network Development, A.K. Mahan and W.H. Melody (eds), Uruguay, 2007. ISBN (printed version): 978-9974-8067-0-2

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1. Introduction | William H. Melody
Section 1 – Affordability and Use
Chapter 2. Improving Affordability of Telecommunications: Cross-fertilisation between the developed and the developing world | Claire Milne
Chapter 3. Telecom Use on a Shoestring: Expenditure and perceptions of affordability amongst the financially constrained | Avanti Moonesinghe, Harsha de Silva, Neluka Silva & Ayoma Abeysuriya
Chapter 4. Variations in Expenditure on Communications in Developing Countries: A synthesis of the evidence from Albania, Mexico, Nepal and South Africa (2000-2003) | Sebastian Ureta
Chapter 5. ICT Usage and its Impact on Profitability of SMEs: A case of eight African countries | Steve Esselaar, Christoph Stork, Ali Ndiwalana & Mariama Deen-Swarray
Section 2 – Models to Extend Participation in Network Development
Chapter 6. An Investigation of the Replicability of a Microfinance Approach for Extending Telecom Access to Marginal Customers | Malathy Knight-John, Ayesha Zainudeen & Abu-Saeed Khan
Chapter 7. Smart Subsidies – Getting the Conditions Right: The experience of expanding rural telecoms in Nepal | Harsha de Silva & Ratna Kaji Tuladhar
Chapter 8. Microtelcos in Latin America and the Caribbean | Hernan Galperin & Bruce Girard
Chapter 9. Research and Education Network in Ghana: Promoting ICT in developing countries through research cooperation | Reza Tadayoni & Knud Erik Skouby
Section 3 – Regulatory and Information Practices
Chapter 10. Benchmarking National Telecom Regulatory Authority Websites of the Asia-Pacific Region | Chanuka Wattegama
Chapter 11. An Institutional and Practical Evaluation of URSEC – Uruguay’s Communication Regulator – and its Relationship with Citizens | Gustavo Gómez & Amy Mahan
Chapter 12. Regional Regulation of Telecom Markets in the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States | Andrew Barendse
Chapter 13. Multinational Operators in African Mobile Markets | Ewan Sutherland
Chapter 14. Privatisation, Regulation and Investment: A case study of the telecom regulatory environment (TRE) and investment in Guyana | Samuel Braithwaite

Foundation Partners | About the Authors
Diversifying Participation in Network Development

Some issues of importance:
Front page changes every two days, due to number of posts. Scrolling nature means that sometimes the most important topics do not remain at the top for long.
Weaknesses concerning retrieval of documents (unless you know exactly where it is).

Proposed structure:
Our website should be designed to meet Asia Pacific needs. Anything that does not fall under that purview will be handled by the other websites in the network.For this it is important to identify where do we get most of our traffic from?
Based on statistics from Google Analytics, most of our traffic is from the Asia Pacific, then Latin America and the least from Africa.Within the Asia Pacific, South Asia is the main source of our traffic.

But we have very little hits from Africa. And we should visit their website more often too – if they are doing good work, we need to link to them.

Indi: Corporate blogs – need to be a business card, lots of static pages. Document management on blogs is very difficult; its more efficient to outsource this part to another website. Any content that you can outsource is good.

Threee keywords you need to mention when developing a website:
1. web standards – because people access your sites from a variety of media (mobile phones, computers, Google, etc) web standards will ensure that the page looks similar across all media.
2. content management system (CMS)
3. open source – this does nothave to be open source but it is the preferred option.

Nuwan: Does Google catch stylesheets better than static pages?
Indi: No, Google does not catch stylesheets.
Nuwan: But if you have web standards, then would Google catch the page and data better?
Indi: Stylesheets just describes how the pages should look; has to do with all the colours, fonts, etc. Google doesn’t “care” about these details.

Another important thing, as an organization employees should not focus too much on how the site looks, what is most relevant is content. Staff need to write well and regularly.

Headlines are most relevant. Studies have shown that people mostly glance through the headlines, not the headers.

Need a static part of the website, like a front page, where things like training course announcements are seen, rather than pushed further and further down the page.

HdeS: Perhaps we could have two columns, one is static, one is blog-like.
Indi/Nuwan: perhaps we can have two sites; if you are a first time user, you are taken to a static page; if you are a returning visitor, then you’re taken to a blog site; this is enabled by cookies.
SG:The ‘features’ tab on www.3rasia.org may be useful.
RS: This may be good for a less dynamic research organization than LIRNEasia.

CW: Sometimes the front page doesn’t really matter because you can access a site from anywhere, not necessarily the front page only.

RS: How do you measure success on your (Indi) blog? Criteria that I use is by running key search terms (e.g. ‘India USO policy’), and see how high we rank in Google searchers. This is a good qualitative approach. Pure readership/number of visitors doesn’t cut it.
CW: Two approaches. Using key words – most number of search terms and least number of seach terms. On one hand you aim for number of hits, on the other…(?)

RS: What about using Google advertising?
Indi: I have Google advertising on my site, so if I write something about LIRNEasia and you have advertised with Google, then I’d have an ad on my site about LIRNEasia.
RS: We should advertise our training courses with Google.

RS: We need to step back a minute, and consider the larger question that we are trying to address: we’re doing a blog; if we have something interesting to say or show, then we out it up, and see how it flies with our readers; will it energize them? We don’t know. In actual fact, about 95% of our posts don’t have comments. Secondly, we’re trying to disseminate our papers/research; for that we are using DSpace.

Indi: adding the ‘related posts’ feature can help to increase the number of pages viewed (by the same set of readers); but to increase the number of visitors, you need to produce good content.

RS: What do we want to do with the website?

NW: You have to start a discussion, but continue it. Its good to use the website as a filing cabinet.

HdeS: Hits aren’t everything – even a useless website can get 1,000s of hits; the main point is that we haves something that works. Maybe we need to clean it up a bit (business card function of the website) but why change it?

RS: What recommendations should we make to the other sites in the network? We need to find out what exactly they need done before we can provide our inputs.
We have come to a stage where many of our papers are not on our site. We need to think of ways to document and record our PPTs and documents etc. Slideshare is a good way to put up PPTs.

See http://www.indi.ca/2007/07/business-blogging/ for more information.

He made a presentation during the first session entitled “Getting a clearer picture: Demand side ICT data collection”, sharing with the audience some of the findings and the methodology used in LIRNEasia’s recently completed research on teleuse@BOP. During the discussion sessions and on the sidelines of the conference he engaged substantially with the DIRSI researchers planning to replicate the Asian study in Latin America. Dr. de Silva explained to the team the challenges faced in designing and implementing the study across the five countries and suggested possible alternatives.

In the second session entitled “Perspectives of telecom sector performance” he presented slides on the Telecom Regulatory Environment (TRE) 2006. Here Harsha explained how LIRNEasia researchers went about constructing and administering the TRE study in six countries in Asia and also some of the salient findings.

After the conference Dr. de Silva participated at the discussions among the LIRNE family on the preparations of the next WDR/LIRNE research cycle. Prof. Rohan Samarajiva joined in via Skype.

Click HERE for more information about the meeting.

The Race for Numero Uno in Latin Wireless (Businessweek November 27, 2006):

More than 80% of Brazil’s mobile-telephone customers use prepaid service—buying cards to recharge their phones—rather than signing monthly contracts. América Móvil’s average client uses just 71 minutes of airtime each month, spending around $12.50. Although such revenue can add up, signing up all those customers has an impact on profits as well. “The two big operators have had to become more competitive in pricing to win customers,” he says. “They’re trying to build economies of scale to decrease their costs, but even as they’re doing that, their revenue per subscriber is decreasing.”

As América Móvil and Telefónica battle it out, the big winners are Latin American consumers, who have seen the cost of handsets and airtime drop significantly over the past five years. Wireless technology has made it possible for consumers to skip waiting lists for fixed-line installation and go directly to mobile or fixed-wireless phones. “Mobile telephones were considered a luxury, but today, the ice cream salesman on the street has his own cellular phone,” says Telefónica’s Zaldivar.

The 2007 course is designed to enhance the strategic thinking of a select group of senior decision makers in the telecom and related sectors in the Asia Pacific and elsewhere. The focus will be on the most current strategic issues.

The faculty includes:
Prof. William Melody (course convener; designed and led the previous Telecom Reform courses); Prof. Rohan Samarajiva (course convener;designed and led the previous Telecom Reform courses); Dr. Tim Kelly, Head of the Strategy and Policy Unit of the International Telecommunication Union; Mr. Rajendra Singh, of the World Bank, also Former Secretary, TRAI; and Dr. Harsha de Silva, Lead Economist at LIRNEasia.

Mr. Yusuf Annuar Yaacob (Chief Executive Officer of TM International Sdn Bhd. [Telekom Malaysia], a leading investor in the South and South East Asian region) will deliver the keynote at the opening session.

M.H Au (Director General of Telecom, Hong Kong China) will deliver the keynote speech at the course banquet on 1 March.

A day and a half will be set apart for discussing cutting-edge research on sector and regulatory performance commissioned as part of the 2006-07 World Dialogue on Regulation at the Expert Forum on March 2nd and 3rd.

This will be the 11th LIRNE.NET executive training course on telecom regulation, and the second to be offered in the Asia Pacific by LIRNEasia and CONNECTasia Forum Pte. Ltd. Previous LIRNE.NET courses have been offered in Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. This course builds on the successful course held in Singapore in September 2005, with attendees from 18 countries.

Registration ends: January 10th, 2007 (early bird) or February 9th, 2007 (regular; extended due to some seats coming open at the last minute)

More information…

We welcome the opportunity for a debate.

Kevin P. Gallagher and Lyuba Zarsky, “Rethinking Foreign Investment for Development”, Post-Autistic Economics Review, issue 37

Abstract
“In the 1990s, foreign direct investment (FDI) came to be seen as a “miracle drug”—a jumpstart to economic growth and sustainable industrial development, especially in developing countries. Policies to attract FDI became the centerpiece of both national development strategies and supra-national investment agreements.

This paper examines case study and statistical evidence about the impacts of FDI in developing countries on economic growth, technology spillovers and environmental performance. Mirroring the heterogeneity of developing countries, we find that there is no consistent relationship: the impact of FDI on each variable has been found to be positive, neutral, or even negative. Key variables are domestic policies, capacities and institutions.

We conclude that the purported benefits of FDI are exaggerated and its centrality in development strategies misplaced. Rather than attract FDI per se, development policies should aim to promote endogenous local capacities for sustainable production. With the right national and global policy framework, FDI could help in that process.”

LIRNEasia’s position can be summarized as follows:
1. Investment (foreign or local) is necessary for extending telecom networks and providing connectivity.
2. In the face of many competing demands such as for water, roads, and hospitals, it seems that scarce government resources should be spent on things other than telecom. Furthermore, private investors are willing to invest in telecom, as opposed to water, hospitals, etc.
3. Therefore, conditions must be created for private investment.
4. A stable and non-expropriatory regulatory environment is an essential condition for investment (be it local for foreign).
5. The TRE is a measure of that environment.

Let the debate begin.

• Executives from telecom operators and equipment suppliers interested in innovative ideas that can be applied in developing as well as developed country settings.
• Policy makers, regulators, researchers and professionals interested in cutting edge ICT policy research

  Download course brochure (PDF)
  Download course registration (Word Document)
  Download course registration (PDF)

The research that will be discussed includes:

• A multi-country study to understand the telecom strategies of the poor covering 3200 respondents in India and Sri Lanka as well as a meta-study of Bangladesh
• A backbone study that looks at the terms and conditions of access where they exist and the consequences of their absence or exclusionary access regimes in South Asia.
• An assessment of the first Asian least cost subsidies auctions being implemented in Eastern Nepal, with  comparison of the nascent Sri Lankan case.
• An assessment of the extension of network in rural areas using access deficit charges & universal service in India, a country that with the second largest universal service fund in the world. 
• An examination of the use of business-NGO partnerships to extend rural connectivity and the factors that are required for success based on the experience of Bangladesh.
• An exploration of the possibilities for stimulating bottom-up business approaches to encourage local private operators, investors and co-operatives to participate in sustainable ICT service development in Bhutan.
• An evaluation of the use of WiFi for extending connectivity at the margins, including the scalability and impact of availability and pricing of broadband capacity to link to the Internet backbone. 
• A study to understand supply and demand for ICTs by measuring access and usage in Africa, to develop an e-Index