Charles Kenny

ICT: Promises, Opportunities and Dangers for the Rural Future

ICT: Promises, Opportunities and Dangers for the Rural Future is for the Rural Futures conference in Plymouth, UK in March.  The paper briefly reviews the evidence regarding the rapid rollout of rural ICT access worldwide, and the powerful tools that access can unleash.  At the same time, it suggests the limits to the ICT revolution in rural areas especially in poor countries, and points to the limited evidence that ICT will reverse forces of agglomeration favouring the concentration of people and productivity in urban areas.  It concludes by suggesting the marginal role for ICT-based policymaking in regional development strategies.

Baywatch: Bigger than Aid?

Baywatch: Bigger than Aid? is an unpublished short paper.  It ponders the economic impact of the television program Baywatch --an everyday tale of lifesaving folk-- on people in the developing world.  It concludes that, without considerably greater academic attention to the subject, we may never know the coefficient of Baywatch episodes on per capita income growth.

Ending Global Poverty Through Tax Breaks to Bill Gates

Ending Global Poverty Through Tax Breaks to Bill Gates is an unpublished short paper. Many developing countries have enacted or are considering subsidies and tax breaks for the ICT industry.  This paper argues that the economic justification for such favoritism is very weak.  It is based in part on material from Overselling the Web.

ICTs Enterprise and Development

ICTs Enterprise and Development  is a draft chapter for ICT4D edited by Tim Unwin. It was written with Mike Best. There is no doubting that ICTs have had a significant development impact. Micro- and macroeconomic approaches alike suggest that the rollout of ICTs has improved livelihoods and increased the productivity of businesses. At the same time, the ICT industry itself has been a significant source of profitable investment and employment. This is not to suggest that ICTs are a silver bullet for underdevelopment, however. Successful utilization of communications technologies –and perhaps in particular the Internet—takes a broader economic environment that is conducive to their exploitation. Similarly, ICT industries and ICT-enabled businesses need an investment climate that includes an educated workforce with appropriate technical skills, access to entrepreneurial finance and business talent, reliable infrastructure, a robust but reasonable regulatory environment, and so on. Information and Communications Technologies have a role to play in the development process, but they are one player in a large ensemble cast.

I wrote an earlier collaborative paper on the impact of ICTs on development with Richard Heeks. The Economics of ICTs and Global Inequality: Convergence or Divergence for Developing Countries? was published as an IDPM Working Paper.  If debate on ICTs and development has drawn from any discipline, it has tended to be sociology. This paper attempts to broaden the debate by drawing on economic evidence to ask: will ICTs support economic convergence or divergence between developing and industrialised countries?  In an overall sense, technology is fundamental to development. However, ICTs – while having an uncertain impact on growth – are currently a force for global economic divergence rather than convergence. They diffuse more slowly in developing countries than industrialised countries, and they bring fewer benefits and greater costs to developing countries than industrialised countries.  This does not present an argument against adoption of ICTs by developing countries. Rather, it presents an argument for focus on particular applications and investment priorities.

Internet Governance on a Dollar a Day

Internet Governance on a Dollar a Day  is forthcoming in Information Polity.  Globally, around one billion people live on a dollar a day. About 44 percent –nearly half-- of the World’s population lives on less than two dollars a day. This paper examines the importance of "Internet governance" to such people. Arguments over generic top-level domain names might seem of somewhat esoteric interest to the subsistence farmer. Indeed, if Internet governance is defined in the narrow sense of the management of TLDs (Top Level Domains) and root zone files, it is surely of little importance to poor people. However, given the nature both of technology and of poor people’s demands for information and communication, a broader definition of Internet governance does spill over into issues of importance to all, including the world’s poorest. Furthermore, thinking in terms of "information governance" may make more sense in an increasingly converged sector, and issues of information governance are of undoubted importance to poor people. In turn, this suggests priorities for governments attempting to improve the lives of the poor through increasing information flows.

Young People and ICTs in Developing Countries

Young People and ICTs in Developing Countries  is forthcoming in Information Technology for Development.  The paper is co-authored with Naomi Halewood.  Young people are often ‘first adopters’ of new technologies, and this appears to be the case with ICTs.  Evidence from the developing world suggests that young people have widespread access to broadcast technologies and the telephone, but more limited access to the Internet.  And even amongst young people, Internet use lags considerably behind Internet access.  ICTs, and in particular the Internet, provide opportunities for employment, but it should be noted that there are limits to the economic impact of the Internet in developing countries.  Broadcast technologies can be particularly useful tool in both formal and continuing education, the Internet may have a significant role in vocational and further education.  There are potential social costs of ICT use amongst young people, but these can be mitigated.  Youth-specific policy recommendations focus on the greater use of ICTs in education and content control.

Toward Universal Telephone Access

Toward Universal Telephone Access Market progress and progress beyond the market was published in Telecommunications Policy vol. 31. It was written with Rym Keremane.  The last 10 years have seen an explosion in access to telephone services worldwide based on rapid technology advance in increasingly competitive markets. The mobile phone has driven expansion in subscribers and access, especially in the developing world. This paper estimates global mobile footprint coverage based on 2002 data and calculates that as much as 77 percent of the world’s population may live in an area covered by a mobile signal. Nonetheless, many people remain without access to telephony. The paper estimates the maximum likely cost in terms of cross subsidy within the industry and outside financing for achieving universal access using competitively awarded subsidies to private providers in a reformed market. This upper-end cost is estimated at $5.7 billion, with costs that could not be supplied by a reasonable tax on existing providers (and so required from outside the sector) estimated at $1.8 billion.

Caribbean Telecommunications Reform

The OECS and Regional Telecommunications Reform, co-authered with Donnie DeFreitas and Robert Schware, was published in info, Vol. 3, No.3. The Impact of Reform on Telecommunications Prices and Services in the Countries of the OECS, co-authored with Robert Schware and Eliud Williams, is forthcoming in the Journal of Information Technology for Development. Five member countries of the Organization of East Caribbean States (OECS) — St Lucia, Dominica, Grenada, St Vincent and the Grenadines, and St Kitts and Nevis — are undergoing a unique experiment in telecommunications liberalization. The reform has two interesting features. First, the reform effort was dramatically enhanced because of a legal ruling in one of the member countries that monopoly telecommunications provision is unconstitutional; and, second, the islands hope that a large part of the functions of a telecommunications regulator will be carried out at the regional rather than the national level. Reforms began to show results when the current monopoly service provider slashing the prices of international calls.  Prices have fallen considerably further after the introduction of a regulated price cap.

Overselling the Web: Development and the Internet

Overselling the Web? Development and the Internet is being published in September 2006.  The book discusses the role of the Internet in development, and policies designed to increase its impact.  The widespread and rapid adoption of the Internet in the developing world suggests that there are real opportunities presented by the new technology.  At the same time, Overselling the Web suggests that the overall impact may be smaller than commonly thought and that policymakers should be wary of large-scale subsidies, tax breaks and rollout programs.

Here are the preface and Chapter One.  Here's the publisher's blurb, a couple of reviews and a link to the Library Journal's 50 best business books of 2006, where it appears.  And here is a short summary article in ITID based on the book.  Chapter summaries are below.

Overselling the Web Chapter One: Will the Internet Change the World?

Chapter One of Overselling the Web? looks at some predictions regarding the impact of the Internet on development.  George Gilder chose December 31st, 1999 most suitably to suggest the change might be millenarian:

With any technology that will change the world so radically as the Internet… religious wars are important and inescapable….The twentieth century has been an era when an atheistic belief in the ultimacy of matter and the triviality of man led to the horrors of Nazism, Communism, and an epoch of total war. Now sweeping through the global economy, the overthrow of matter will unleash an undertow of religious belief that will make the new millennium a time of awakening to the oceanic grandeur and goodness of the universe...

Thomas Friedman hasn't gone quite as far, but he, too, has been pretty optimistic:   “We are now in a period of radical change, possibly more sweeping and complex than any period since 1776-1789.”  Technology, he argues, “is shrinking the world from a size medium to a size small.”  At the same time, it “turns out that the real secret of success in the information age is what it always was: fundamentals -- reading, writing and arithmetic, church, synagogue and mosque, the rule of law and good governance.”  Indeed, these basics have got even more important.  “Just when the developing world is coming to really grasp that it has no choice but to get itself ready to climb aboard this train… the train is going to get faster -- not slower -- as the developing world moves toward Internet-based commerce, communication and learning systems. What's worse, no one can slow the train down, because the world economy today is just like that Internet: everybody is connected but nobody is in charge.”

The potential of the Internet as a force for development was the focus of a G-8 meeting as well as a UN Summit (in two parts).  It has catalyzed aid programs and any number of "e-readiness assessments."  All of this activity is based on what might be termed the "Okinawa Consensus":

The Internet and related technologies present a significant opportunity for developing countries to improve their growth prospects.  Indeed, the Internet may be a ‘leapfrog’ technology –one that creates an opportunity for developing countries to catch up economically with the industrial world.  The technology is a powerful tool to improve government service delivery, education, and income-earning opportunities even for the world’s poorest people.  Given that, poor country governments (in partnership with the private sector and with the help of donors) need to dedicate significant resources to expanding the use of the Internet, especially in government and education and especially to reach the poor.  There is also a role to promote Internet industries through technology parks, and Internet use through public access programs such as putting computers in libraries and building stand-alone Internet access points. 

Overselling the Web? is about the policies suggested, the rationale behind them, and which ones might make sense.