At LIRNEasia we study and teach about regulation. In March-April we spent some effort seeking to contribute to what we saw as an effort to remedy some long-standing political failures through transparent, consultative processes set in motion by Sri Lanka’s Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka (PUCSL). Our recommendations were not accepted, but we still hope the remedy will itself survive political failure. In the aftermath of the protests and the President’s overruling of the PUCSL, several observers have suggested that the PUCSL is a redundant entity that should be wound up. I agree that it failed in this instance and that it has done grievous harm to itself and to the essential process of moving toward cost-reflective tariffs.
I recall a Sinhala poem from my time at Peradeniya University. It asked who had actually built Sigiriya and the great irrigation works: The kings who routinely get the credit or the unnamed many who did the actual building? The telecom reforms in Sri Lanka are now seen as an unqualified success. The reforms did not just happen. Courageous decision making was needed.
Today, the Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka, held the oral-presentation component of the 2013 tariff hearing. In their effort to accommodate 70 or so persons/organizations among the 200+ that had made written submissions, they limited speaking time to 5-10 mts depending on how many issues had been covered and did not ask any questions of those making presentations. This was a pity, since the whole point of face-to-face interaction is interactivity. That said, I still found the exercise educative. For example, the spokesperson for one organization asked why the PUCSL had allowed a component of costs for ROE, return on equity.
ABSTRACT This paper investigates the factors that influence formalization of poor micro-enterprises (MEs) in urban locations in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The paper draws from a multi-country survey of information and communication needs of poor MEs in Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka in the second quarter of 2013. Through logistic regression, it models business registration among such MEs to understand what affects the decision to formalize within these environments. The paper also looks at the barriers to registration and the policy implications from these findings. Using descriptive statistics and models we find that the MEs lack of formalization is explained to a significant level by their level of education, gender, size of the enterprise and awareness levels.
LIRNEasia’s current cycle of research focuses on how mobile platforms can help improve customer relationship management in utilities. I have been contributing to the current debate on rationalizing the electricity tariffs in Sri Lanka based on the work Partha Mukhopadhyay and I did in relation to the recently concluded SAFIR core course and laying the foundation for disseminating the results of the research project when completed. Many of my interventions have been over electronic media, but here is a summary piece in LBO that is also being published in Sinhala in Ravaya next week. Tariff design must contribute to bring down peak demand by around five percent. This is a policy objective pursued in many countries, especially in light of climate-change concerns.
I should not have been surprised, but I was. In the course of the Asia Pacific Summit session that I was moderating the Chief Strategy Officer of Indosat, Prashant Gokarn, said that they are no longer keeping 30% of earnings from apps, but giving pretty much everything to the developers. We can make our money on data, he said. I asked, is this just you? Supun Weerasinghe, Chief Stategy Officer at Axiata, said, no.
There is so much wrong with the IDI. It gives a higher ICT development rank to Cuba (106) and Zimbabwe (115) well ahead of India (119). I ridiculed the predecessor of the IDI in the past, but they keep churning it out unfazed and people keep paying attention, which then causes me to pay attention too. There was even a fuss in the Bangladesh media about how that esteemed country managed to get itself excluded from IDI coverage in 2012. Few months back I promised to analyze the S Asian IDI rankings in more detail, so here goes.
Bangladesh has raised its broadband bar from 128 Kbps to 1 Mbps, said a press report. Time will answer if it’s a political statement or an official roadmap. But the government’s prejudice on technology is alarming. The whole country should be connected through optical fibre cable. We want to provide broadband to all corners of the country, and it is very much possible.
The 2012 UN e government survey is out. Sri Lanka is still second in the South Asian region, behind the Maldives. But its world ranking has slipped even further. Now it’s 115th. It was 111th in 2010.
Use the embedded frame below or click here to view the story. Empowering Communities with Voice-enabled Technologies for Crisis Management on Prezi
The paper was presented at the ITS India conference early this year. Somehow, we neglected to do a post about it. But, better late than never. Here it is. A subsequent revision of the ILDTS in late 2009 failed to address the concerns raised in this paper.
Right now disaster awareness is high. A cyclone was heading toward Sri Lanka’s Northeast Coast but has apparently veered off toward the Indian East Coast. Flooding has started in different parts of the country, trees are falling, transport has been affected. Of course, people are very aware of Hurricane Sandy and the US East Coast because of the power of international media. I found myself also monitoring Hawai’i a few days ago, because they were expecting a tsunami there (it came, but at insignificant wave heights).
Thought-provoking piece, based on company-survey data, about how place is becoming irrelevant to work. BTW, the tax principle that Bangladesh is praised for was implemented in Sri Lanka maybe five years ago. The online work is already changing how some governments think about labor. Last May the government of Bangladesh decided to classify online work as export-related commercial income, free of taxes, instead of as a taxed offshore remittance. The idea, Mr.
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.
In 2008, I was presenting the results of Teleuse@BOP2 at the University of Salzburg, when a member of the audience wanted my response to his assertion that the Sri Lanka’s telecom reforms had contributed to rising income inequality. I said I did not see a relation, but he went on to publish a paper on the topic. Internally, we had a few conversations about responding to this piece, but competing demands on our time put that task on the backburner and finally took it off the agenda. Income inequality is a serious problem, no doubt. Many people have studied this problem, looking at education levels, welfare polices and so on as possible explanations but without reaching a conclusive finding.