Professor Xue Lan of Tsinghua University in Beijing participated in the inaugural session of the La@5 conference through a video link, kindly provided by Tata Communications Lanka. We were worried about this, because he was competing with real people (Milinda Moragoda, Minister of Justice and Law Reforms, Sri Lanka, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Center for Policy Research, New Delhi) in the co-presence of the large audience. This report by an LBO journalist who was in the room suggests that the message overcame the limitations of the medium. Ad hoc public policy formulation can be disastrous and both China and India are evolving evidence based processes to back effective government action, academics and researchers said at a policy forum in Colombo. “The strategic direction is set by the Party and State Council and the People’s Congress makes legislation,” Xue Lan professor of Public Policy at Tsinghua University in China said, participating in a regional policy forum in Colombo.
by Ayesha Zainudeen CellBazaar is a classifieds site in Bangladesh. Potential buyers and sellers can search for and post information on goods. If you compare CellBazaar to a developed marketplace like Amazon, Amazon covers the full range of a transaction. The search, payment, feedback, delivery. CellBazaar actually just focuses on the search.
Understanding the volatility of cash flow of poor people is important in assessing the mass appeal of Mobile Money. M transfers must be used to smoothen consumption and expense. We need to consider how a poor person who skips meals can use technology to avoid it. The urban poor live in congestion while another group lives in rural isolation. The estate poor are institutionally dependent i.
Harsha de Silva I’m looking at mobile payments from an economics angle. The idea here is to understand the volatility of cash flow of the poor. Then the prevalence of m-commerce to smoothen consumption. Then finally how to increase use of m-commerce solutions. As a logic for this, you’re looking at people with irregular income streams.
After reading the historical studies of telecom in the United State, my grad student said don’t pay too much attention to interconnection. The standard answer, what are the three priorities of regulation -interconnection, interconnection and interconnection. Now, later, I have to kind of say Divakar was right. This is such a radical statement that the guy from the FCC is cringing here. My example is Bangladesh.
Timothy Gonsalves Telecom networks are highly technical and public review is usually cursory. Recommendations primarily come from the industry. In broadband the metrics traditionally come from the industry and there’s a mismatch with the subscribers expectations. Regulators specify last mile access speed, the provider is concerned with the access node, but the subscriber is concerned with the speed of accessing the content server. Under the customer driven approach we’ve defined test metrics, and tested them against three different servers, repeated at different times of day, and different days.
Adam Smith said that the invisible hand rules the market. That may be true in a world of perfect competition but it doesn’t hold in the world we live in. Markets arise spontaneously from the institutional framework. There are three main transitions that happen when markets change or develop; Feudal to industrial, communist to post-communist, emerging to developed. Capacity must be built through creating efficient institutions.
Chair, Sherille Ismail: I’m with the FCC and here but here in a personal capacity, not representing the FCC. I’d like to start by quoting Adam Smith, who made the argument that there’s an invisible hand that rules markets.I don’t believe that’s true of the world we live in. It’s not enough to destroy what was before, it’s important to create something to new. Even if you take someone like Margaret Thatcher, a foremost champion of the free market, when she brought forth reforms she actually created 12 regulatory agencies.
This features excerpts from presentations by Rajat Kathuria, Per Hemlersen, and audience question. You can read more by following the live blog posts from that time. Rajat Kathuria On Indonesia Per Helmersen On Speaking To Decision Makers How can researchers speak to the corporate world? Question From Bill Melody On Prediction
In India 5% of gross revenue went into an (undisbursed) fund. This was for reaching the rural poor, but they were already being effectively reached by mobile. LIRNEasia found that many consumers were planning on buying a mobile for their rural connection. LIRNEasia made multiple, evidence-based policy interventions ranging from papers, presentations, Op-Ed articles, etc to rationalize this Universal Service Fund issue. Post policy change, we measured perception measures.
The presentation on mobile price benchmarking is available for download here. (PowerPoint). There is a considerable amount of data in the presentation and it may be more conducive to download on your personal laptop. The other presentations from this session are also available Alison Gillwald, RIA, South Africa – Gillwald LIRNEasia@5 2009 Helani Galpaya, LIRNEasia – Galpaya_MeasuringSectorPerformance
How do we get the attention of policy makers? It’s very simple, use national rankings. These are very good at actually grabbing attention. Back in the late 1980s we did some work at the OECD on how to develop performance indicators for public telecom operators. The work we did comparing countries, etc, got the interest and I think spurred reform.
Sujata Gamage Let me define informal. Glenda talked about knowledge in universities, that’s formal knowledge. Rasheed talked about intermediate organizations that take it to farmers. Maybe we should focus on the informal. Innovation is part of the human condition, we’re always trying to make our life easy.
Bill Melody: Over the last five years the world has seen the explosion of prepaid cell phones. Neither policy makers nor researchers understood the prepaid model. The development was an unexpected one promoted by poor people. I’d be interested in the panels interpretation. Emmanuel Lallana: In the Philippines that’s the case.
The challenges of conveying research results to corporate leaders are substantial. Questions that need to be asked are; how to better communicate the importance of research results to senior managers? Does in fact evidence get used within companies? and if so what type of evidence considered to be evidence? and how are decision with regard to strategy/policy really made?
Let me give you a small glimpse into corporate reality, where I’m free. We discussed the challenges of conveying research results to corporate people. They’re very busy people and the distance is enormous. Rohan then asked me to suggest how to target these decision makers in the corporate setting with relevant evidence. This is something I’ve been struggling with for 18-20 years.