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TELECOMMUNICATIONS POLICY 83
has also been explored by recent critical researchers. For more, see:
Chaterjee 2004; Freeman 2000; Kabeer 2002; Voss and Linden 2002.
6. The North–South split that occurred during the Uruguay Rounds of
the GATT far from disappeared in 1994 (See: McDowell 1997). As
discussed in Chapter 2, the WTO is the main institution where these
debates about trade take place, and, as evident in the 2004 meetings
in Cancun or the 2005 G8 meetings in Scotland, access by Southern
nations to developed markets in long-subsidized areas like agriculture
continues to be grounds for disagreement and negotiation.
7. The ‘new middle classes’ constitute a minority of the population
in most of the emerging economies in Asia and Latin America, but
their purchasing power in sheer numbers has been the source of great
interest for telecommunications transnationals since the early 1990s.
Studies of the growing and new inequalities between these middle
classes (or ‘new rich’) and everyone else reveal complex divisions
based on class, but also ethnicity (that is, the backlash against the
diasporic Chinese population in Southeast Asia following the Asian
financial crisis) religion (that is, the rise of Hindu fundamentalism
among the globalized elites of India) and gender (that is, nationalist
middle class assertion of Asian ‘family values’) which requires careful
empirical study. For more, see: Sen and Stivens 1998; and Pinches
1997.
8. Corruption and its solution, ‘good governance’, are terms that began
to dominate the World Bank and other development agencies from
the mid- to late 1990s (Marquette 2001). However, the argument that
state ‘interference’ in economic development causes corruption was
the explicit assumption that guided the telecommunications reform
from the mid-1980s.
9. Researchers have pointed out the paucity of comparative empirical
studies of telecommunications policy reform, especially given the
scale of reform all, within the course of one decade (Noll 2002). However,
Singh (1999) and Evans (1995) both provide comparative frameworks
to study institutional differences between emerging economies
engaged in telecommunications reform and IT development focusing
primarily on the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s.
10. For current WTO commitments see: http://www.wto.org/english/
tratop e/serv e/telecommunication e/telecommunication commit
exempt list e.htm
11. In India, the issue of rural access has been paramount in discussions
about national public interest given the fact that the overwhelming
majority of the nation’s citizens live in areas that have literally
been untouched by the ‘high-tech’ revolution that has very much