In our work on agricultural supply chains, we looked at how small holders could participate in export value chains because these were the most difficult cases and also where the money was. At least at the beginning of the adoption process, the greatest demand for ICT based innovation is likely to come from these supply chains. Air freight services are a necessary condition for most high-value agricultural exports. In this article on what the full liberalization of Sri Lanka’s Mattala Airport, I discuss the complementarity. For the most part, air freight services are produced jointly along with air passenger services.
Sri Lanka has decided to fully liberalize a white-elephant airport, an unusual act in this network industry which is riddled with protections for national flag carriers. Taking a respite from the Constitutional matters that preoccupy most Sri Lankans these days, I shared some ideas on the prospects for the fully liberalized airport with a journalist. These thoughts are more fully fleshed out in an op-ed that will appear shortly. Airlines are usually drawn to airports which give fifth freedoms, or the right to pick up passengers on the way to a third destinations, which is restricted by many countries to give a privilege to – usually – a badly run state-run domestic carrier. “Fifth freedom rights are valuable where there is are passengers to pick up,” explains Rohan Samarajiva of LirneAsia, a regional think tank based in Colombo.
The liberalization process in Myanmar is chugging along, with an arrest or two, bad advice from the ITU Regional Office and so on. Hope things will get better. In a poor country like Myanmar, it is hard for grassroots people to get a cell phone. The price has dropped to 150,000 kyat but there are just 1.24 million mobile phones in a country with a population of over 60 million.
I had treated the claims by the Secretary General of the ITU that the ITU had facilitated the telecom boom with mild amusement. But in the context of the upcoming Dubai WCIT, amusement is not perhaps the best reaction. Let us begin with the actual claim on the ITU website, more nuanced than that of the Secretary General: While the ITRs were a compromise at the time, they turn out, in retrospect, to have been instrumental in facilitating continuing privatization and liberalization of telecommunications markets. These trends were further facilitated by agreements made in the Global Agreement on Trade in Services in 1994 (Annex on Telecommunications) and in 1996 (Reference Paper on Basic Telecommunications Services). The ITRs contained a key provision in Article 9, Special Arrangements.
Sri Lanka Telecom Growth 1992-2010 The validity of the proposition that extending the existing accounting-rate regime for international voice to Internet traffic in order to provide additional revenues to increase the build-out of broadband infrastructure in developing countries rests on the claim that the accounting-rate regime contributed to the extraordinary increase in voice connectivity over the past years by providing funds for building out the infrastructure. As can be seen from the Figure above, the rapid growth that led to the elimination of the persistent waiting lists in Sri Lanka commenced in 2002-03. It was in this same period that the government liberalized the international telecommunications market, issuing multiple external gateway licenses. The inflow of revenues from the accounting-rate regime fell sharply. Yet connectivity exploded.
When I ceased to proffer policy advice to the government of Bangladesh some time back, I predicted that the International Long Distance Telecommunication Services Policy would fail, and that bypass would not be eradicated. Seeing a report that massive bypass was reemerging after a quiet period following arrests and confiscations, I wrote an oped in the Daily Star urging a reworking of the policy. Here is an excerpt: In 2007 when the government-appointed committee formulating the international Long Distance Telecommunication Services (ILTDS) Policy sought my advice, I told them that the larger policy objectives would be best served by liberalising international gateways. Liberalisation would enhance the competitiveness of Bangladesh’s export industries and create conditions for the efflorescence of the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, thereby generating white-collar jobs for educated youth. It would eradicate the cancer of black money generated from the bypass business that was corroding the country’s body politic.