L I R N E . N E T

In a new working paper, Ewan Sutherland, Research Fellow at the LINK Centre, considers the role of national auditors in telecom policy oversight. “With almost two hundred NRAs the question of their oversight, or the regulation of regulators, is now a very general concern. The processes auditors general use can and do improve the overall system and the workings of both ministries and regulators.” Sutherland sketches out the roles of auditors in ten countries and draws conclusions around the advantages that national auditors can bring to national telecom regulation in terms of processes and oversight; and the parliamentary level requirements to benefit from auditor’s assessments.

Click here to download the full paper in .pdf format.

Click here to go to the International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI) and here for the Intosai Development Initiative (IDI).
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The Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR), concerned about the future of their national infrastructures, have prepared a report, Infrastructures: Time to Invest, that is likely to be of interest beyond the Netherlands. “The WRR is concerned about the quality of Dutch infrastructures [sewers, energy, telecom, water, etc.] in the long term. The attention devoted by administrators and market players to short-term effects geared towards efficiency, consumer interest and cost, has a detrimental effect on investment in the public interest in the long term.”

Download the report’s table of contents and executive summary here.

A collection of papers (including Professor Bill Melody’s “Private Equity Funds and Public Utilities: Where Incentive Structures Collide”), were prepared for this report and published under New Perspectives on Investment in Infrastructures (v19 jun 08) by Amsterdam University Press. These are also available for download. Click here for the information page or here to download the collection in .pdf.

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Professor W.H. Melody’s recent keynote speech at the Broadband Cities conference (November 14-15, Amsterdam and Almere, Netherlands) as well as other presentations from the conference, can now be viewed online.

Click here to go to the collection of conference presentations.

Click here for more Private Equity Funds work by Melody.

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The fiberevolution blog highlights and comments on Professor W.H. Melody’s recent keynote speech at the Broadband Cities conference (November 14-15, Amsterdam and Almere, Netherlands).

The crux of Prof. Melody’s presentation was then to show how Private Equity had driven two major European incumbents to the ground, namely Eircom in Ireland and TDC in Denmark. I won’t go through the chronology of investment reduction and asset destruction to generate short term cash, but I think the audience was, as I was myself, flabbergasted. Not that this was not known, but the accumulation of fact was very damning indeed.

Ultimately, Prof. Melody’s message was two-fold:

• NGAN investment requires patient capital
• Private Equity is not the way to go.

Click here to read the full article.

Click here to view Melody’s conference presentation.
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