New directions for telecommunications policy research in Latin America

Citation

Viecens, F. and Mariscal, J. (2013), "New directions for telecommunications policy research in Latin America", info, Vol. 15 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/info.2013.27215caa.001

New directions for telecommunications policy research in Latin America

Article Type: Guest editorial From: info, Volume 15, Issue 3

This special issue was conceived in Santiago de Chile in May 2012, during the sixth conference of the Americas Information and Communications Research Network (ACORN). The organizers had invited Colin Blackman (Editor, info) to participate in a panel about the challenges of academic publishing, particularly for emerging scholars based in Latin America. A conversation followed about the shortage of scholarship on Latin America published in the field’s major English-language journals. Barely a year after this conversation, this special issue has come to light, showcasing the quality of the work presented at ACORN, and more generally of the progress that our field has made in the region.

Building an academic field takes several decades. In the US and the Europe, the study of information and communication policies is well established as an area of inquiry, both within universities and in conferences that bring together academics, policymakers and industry. The field reached middle age last year as Telecommunications Policy Research Conference (TPRC) celebrated its fortieth anniversary (EuroCPR, its European cousin, is slightly younger). In other regions of the world the field is its infancy, facing multiple barriers for healthy growth. Among them are: underfunded universities, the fragmentation of academic publishing across multiple languages, and a policy environment often unreceptive of academic research.

ACORN was established to help overcome these barriers to field-building in Latin America. With generous support from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) from Canada and several academic and industry partners, the conference has rapidly positioned itself at the center of current debates about information and communication policies in the region. It has also benefitted significantly from close collaborations with its academic cousins both in the north (TPRC and EuroCPR) and in the south (CPRsouth). Its success can be measured in several ways:

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  growing numbers of submissions have put downward pressure on the acceptance rate, currently at around 40 percent (on pair with some of the most competitive conferences in the field);

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  authors represent a wide variety of countries in the region, although the larger countries with more established research institutions continue to be over-represented (Argentina, Brazil and Mexico typically account for about half of submissions); and

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  bibliographical analysis based on the papers presented at ACORN between 2007 and 2011 suggests the gradual strengthening of a relatively dense scholarly network.¹

This special issue present a small sample of the knowledge network consolidating around ACORN. They address key issues facing policymakers in Latin America, including the implementation of national initiatives to promote broadband, the institutional design of regulatory mechanisms in the telecoms sector, and the regulation of interconnection terms between mobile operators. These issues will also resonate with academics and policymakers elsewhere, despite the national or regional context favored by the authors.

In fact, the interplay between the global forces driving changes in the information and communications sector and the specificities of national or regional contexts is a theme that cuts across several of the articles in this issue. After more than two decades of market-oriented reforms in the telecommunications industry, the original consensus regarding the nature of regulatory policies is being re-examined. These reforms set the stage for an unprecedented period of growth and innovation in the Latin American telecoms industry over the past two decades. However, such growth has not been sufficient to meet increasing societal demands for advanced services, nor to mitigate regional disparities in access and use. These issues are not unique to Latin America. Yet as the articles in this volume reveal, how they are interpreted and addressed is closely tied to the local context.

The four articles in this volume offer insights about past policies and explore the fundamental changes the region is experiencing in the nature of regulatory policy. The first, by Katz, Koutroumpis and Callorda, examines the different stages of digital development found in a sample of Latin American countries. The authors create a “digitization index” that measures not only the deployment and adoption of information technologies (the more conventional approach) but also includes a wider range of indicators associated with adoption skills and effective use. In turn they estimate the impact of digitization on economic growth in the region.

The novelty of their approach lies in looking at the impact of new ICTs in a more holistic fashion. A clear policy lesson emerges from their findings: in order to maximize the positive impact of new ICTs, governments must look beyond traditional supply-side policy instruments, designing initiatives that promote the balanced growth of a complex ecosystem of demand and supply factors. The article clusters countries in four different stages of digitization, and identifies the key challenges faced by each cluster. The good news is that results suggest that the pace of digitization in Latin America is accelerating, helping laggards catch-up with the more advanced nations in the region and elsewhere.

The second article, by Galperin, Mariscal and Viecens, provides a good example of the interplay between global forces and regional context in the analysis of information and communication policies. The authors compare the instruments and goals of policy initiatives to promote broadband in five Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico), exploring variations in economic structure and political coalitions to explain differences in the policies adopted. The analysis emphasizes recent changes in policymakers’ structure of incentives that favor a more proactive policy approach to broadband development. Significant differences are also found between broadband initiatives in Latin America and those in more developed countries: while richer nations attempt to outperform each other in a broadband speed arms race, broadband initiatives in Latin America have more modest quality goals. Instead, the focus is on addressing regional and socioeconomic imbalances in basic access services.

What are the implications of the return of the state as a central actor in the Latin American telecommunications industry? To answer this question, the authors start by differentiating two basic types of broadband initiatives. The first type, adopted in Argentina and Brazil, favors full government funding and control over the new network assets deployed. The second, adopted in Chile, Colombia and Mexico, represent variations on the public-private partnership (PPP) model. The conclusion emphasizes the different challenges that each model presents to the existing regulatory structure, and urges governments to address them in order to strike a lasting balance between public initiatives and private investments in the sector.

One of the key challenges that proactive government policies present to the current telecoms legal regime is the regulation of the new operators being created as part of national broadband initiatives. Can governments effectively regulate operators which depend on state support, and whose strategies are vulnerable to electoral results? The article by Trillas and Montoya provides a useful analytical framework to answer this question. The authors effectively summarize several decades of research about the institutional design of regulatory systems in the telecoms sector, and provide an estimate of the impact of regulatory independence on telephony penetration in Latin America.

An independent telecommunications regulator is part of the standard package of market reforms adopted by countries worldwide. Trillas and Montoya examine the theoretical foundations as well as the empirical evidence behind this idea. Their findings suggest that a more nuanced approach is needed. In theoretical terms, they argue that setting up an independent regulator merely relocates the commitment problem, and introduces new delegation challenges that are far from trivial. Empirically, they find that the contribution of regulatory independence to service penetration in Latin America is statistically significant but quantitatively modest. Their conclusions offer insights about the design of regulatory institutions that promote private investments, prevent capture, and allow coordination with broader government goals. Reforms, they argue, should not necessarily “strengthen” agencies, but increase their effectiveness.

The last article, by Ros and Umaña, questions the effectiveness of another element of the conventional telecoms regulatory toolkit: the adoption of asymmetric rules on dominant market players. Specifically, they argue that the recent imposition of a price-cap formula on Colombian mobile operator Comcel for its off-net voice calls has made consumers worse off. Interestingly, the authors argue that relatively high market shares do not entail lack of rivalry. The policy lesson drawn from the empirical results is clear: in network industries, the application of regulatory tools that favor competition between operators must be carefully weighed against the potential for losses in overall economic welfare.

The rapid adoption of mobile phones as well as the emergence of the Internet economy, along with the applications and services it enables, have placed new ICTs at the forefront of development strategies. Sound information and communication policies that promote investments and effective adoption are therefore needed in Latin America and other emerging regions. Our field has much to contribute to this goal. The articles in this issue are a testimony to the value of this contribution.

Notes

1. Bossio, J. (2011). La Investigación sobre Tecnologías de la Información y Comunicaciones en América Latina 2007-2011. Lima: DIRSI/Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.

Hernan Galperin, Fernanda Viecens, Judith Mariscal