Bangladesh exported 50 percent less manpower in 2009. Thousands of jobless workers also returned home as their employers went broke after the Wall Street collapsed. Yet inward remittance grew by 20 percent ($10.72 billion) in 2009. How could fewer workers send the highest-ever remittance?
It is nice to know that we at LIRNEasia have been ahead of the curve on Broadband QoSE, including on understanding it as more than simply download speed. Professor Gonsalves’s paper on the subject is here. The NYT today carried a story that says many of the things we have been talking about for the past two years. Tracking the speed of Internet service is becoming more and more important as everyone asks the Internet to do more than handle e-mail messages and Web pages. A few lines of text can take its time arriving, but applications sending voice calls or streaming video become unusable if there is too much delay in delivery.
Voice and Data has brought up two issues we have been pushing since 2008: intra-SAARC call prices and roaming prices. Our good friend Anand Raj Khanal, Secretary of the NTA, has said it is simply a matter between operators. Respectfully, we disagree. Lowering roaming charges in Nepal, when done by Nepal operators, benefits the customers of another country; it does not benefit Nepalese roaming in that country. If all the SAARC regulators agree on lowering roaming charges at the same time, this asymmetry goes away.
The censors among us (they do not live only in China) need to pay attention to the consequences of their actions and how it can alienate the next generation. “How am I going to live without Google?” asked Wang Yuanyuan, a 29-year-old businessman, as he left a convenience store in Beijing’s business district. China’s Communist leaders have long tried to balance their desire for a thriving Internet and the economic growth it promotes with their demands for political control. The alarm over Google among Beijing’s younger, better-educated and more Internet savvy citizens — China’s future elite — shows how wobbly that balancing act can be.
Internet censorship exists in several of the countries we work in, ranging from the Maldives to Sri Lanka. While censorship is not our focus, our readers may find this story on how Chinese Internet users tunnel through the great firewall of interest. The Great Firewall of China is hardly impregnable. Just as Mongol invaders could not be stopped by the Great Wall, Chinese citizens have found ways to circumvent the sophisticated Internet censorship systems designed to restrict them. They are using a variety of tools to evade government filters and to reach the wide-open Web that the Chinese government deems dangerous — sites like YouTube, Facebook and, if Google makes good on its threat to withdraw from China, Google.
The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami showed, among other things, the power of the Internet to raise money. Now Haiti is showing the power of the mobile to raise donations for earthquake relief. Old-fashioned television telethons can stretch on for hours. But the latest charity appeal is short enough for Twitter: “Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to @RedCross relief.” In the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, many Americans are reaching for their cellphones to make a donation via text message.
What I like about the new economy is that no one is king of the hill for too long. IBM, the target of Apple’s famous 1984 ad, almost went under and reinvented itself as an open source champion for the comeback. Microsoft is no longer looking like a big bad bully. And Nokia who seemed to own the mobile space is scrambling. It is getting hammered not only in the network equipment space (where the alliance with Siemens did not do much good) but in the main game which is handsets.
We documented the research done by Jensen and Aker on the benefits of mobiles to producers and consumers. Now we have a third good piece of research, this time not of decentralized information provision, but of centralized provision in India with the e Choupals. ITC Limited, an Indian company that is one of the largest buyers of soyabeans, felt it was paying over the odds, but was unable to monitor the traders closely. Starting in October 2000 it began to introduce a network of internet kiosks, called e-choupal, in villages in Madhya Pradesh. (Choupal means “village gathering place” in Hindi.
President Barak Obama has invited dozens of the nation’s top executives to the White House seeking tips on how the federal bureaucracy can become leaner and meaner. Why? Try these examples: The U.S. Census Bureau spent $600 million on a project to make its 2010 count electronic, but the effort failed and the census will be conducted by paper this year.
Foreign Policy magazine calls it “The Unluckiest Country” and Haiti has hardly anything to defend. History of the Western Hemisphere’s second-oldest republic has been dominated by coups, dictators, and foreign interventions. Disastrous natural calamities were never in short supply either. And now it’s the earthquake. The world has answered.
LIRNEasia’s focus is infrastructure, so we don’t write much about censorship and such, except when it becomes unavoidable. There are plenty of entities that have censorship as the primary focus, but few who deal with our specialization. Yet, we are increasingly being dragged into this area, as when our book on ICT infrastructure was detained in the Sri Lanka Customs under some unstated provision, when SMS was shut down on Independence Day and so on. In the midst of the controversy about Google threatening to withdraw from China because of their approach to censorship, it was mentioned in the NYT that some Chinese twitters saw it as a withdrawal from the world by China, not as a withdrawal of Google from China: China promptly tried to censor the ensuing debate about its censorship, but many Chinese Twitter users went out of their way to praise Google. One from Guangdong declared: “It’s not Google that’s withdrawing from China, it’s China that’s withdrawing from the world.
Sri Lanka, with many others, agreed to abide by the Regulatory Reference Paper that forms part of the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade in Services. Clause 6 of the Reference Paper states: Any procedures for the allocation and use of scarce resources, including frequencies, numbers and rights of way, will be carried out in an objective, timely, transparent and non-discriminatory manner. The current state of allocated frequency bands will be made publicly available, but detailed identification of frequencies allocated for specific government uses is not required. This was the case in Sri Lanka until the new website for set up (inaugurated by a high official of the ITU which supports transparency and other good things). The Master Register of Frequencies that was on the website, is no longer accessible through a button; when one does a search the register that comes up is dated 2003.
I’ve been thinking about demography a lot these days, particularly about the demographic dividend that Bangladesh is about to harvest (if right policies are in place) and Sr Lanka has partially harvested (and wasted). Actually, I’ve been thinking more about the demographic time bomb that is ticking in the form of a massive group of elderly retirees who will drag down not only their children in the working-age group but the entire economy. Sri Lanka’s current/projected life expectancy at birth 2006-11 Male 69.93 Female 75.70 2041-46 Male 73.
One of the key concepts we use when teaching about regulation is administrative expropriation. It is a form of expropriation that is distinguished from the more obvious expropriations by governments (nationalization) or warlords. It nibbles away at the ability to make the expected return on investment and beyond a certain point starts to eat into the invested capital itself. In my teaching I define it as follows: Administrative expropriation = being prevented from making a reasonable return on investment per expectation at point of investing, usually through a series of actions (not decisive when each taken alone), resulting in de facto expropriation of the investment Not necessarily telecom specific; can be through tax laws, customs authorities, etc. Any government can engage in admin expropriation, directly or through proxies The Sunday Leader lead story of 10 January 2010 provides an excellent example of administrative expropriation by a regulator, violating the provisions of the enabling law at the behest of a political authority or in an attempt to curry favor with a political authority.
The Sivagangai District (Tamil Nadu, India) Deputy Director of Health Services (DDHS), Dr. Raghupathy, compared the Real-Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP) to a comprehensive machine with multiple flavors that can give the required surveillance results with the touch of a button. Kurunegala RE (Region Epidemiologist, Sri Lanka), Dr. Hemachandra’s words were “RTBP will give a booster to surveillance in our region”. Evaluation planning workshops took place in Karraikudi, Tamil Nadu and Kurunegala, Sri Lanka.
BTRC has planned to launch a geosynchronous orbit (GSO) satellite. Its latest mission and vision is to fly a couple of hundreds million dollars kite at 35,000-kilometers up above. The regulator is now in search of a consultant “To find interested financers, launching company, manufacturer of satellite and potential subscribers of transponders, make correspondence visit and liaison with them.” The US government’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) have made gloomy forecasts of global demand for commercial space launch services for the period 2009 to 2018. Kevin Reyes, Director of Business Development in Boeing Launch Services, is also pessimistic about the prospects of satellite industry.