Christoph Stork and Alison Gillwald have been engaged with the real-world problem of high mobile termination rates in Southern Africa for several years. Perhaps the earliest intervention was with the Namibian Communication Commission in 2009. Then there were repeated engagements in South Africa.
We know, from our experience, that policy engagement does not leave a lot of time for academic publication. But it’s not that our colleagues did not try to publish in academic journals. They just kept being given the run around by anonymous academic referees who gave more weight to purely theoretical arguments (published) about two-sided markets and waterbed effects than the real-world evidence of retail prices not going up when MTRs were brought closer to costs.
But finally, it is published. I hope now the theorists of waterbed effects will have to justify their speculations.
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