Regulation and the promotion of investment in next generation networks—A European dilemma

The paper discusses the dilemmas facing European regulators (the European Commission and the national regulatory authorities) over the promotion of investment in Next Generation Access Networks (NGANs). Whereas the US has adopted a deregulatory approach and parts of Asia takes an approach linked to industrial policy considerations, the EU has largely left the process to operators working subject to a framework of regulation of access. While this may be enough to elicit investment where there is competition among networks, the incentives to invest are weaker where there is only one fixed network, as is the case in most of the territory of the EU. In reaching this view, the paper examines the prospects for competition from both wireless and municipal networks. It recommends that steps be taken fully to mobilise incentives to invest in NGANs where there is competition. Elsewhere, it may be necessary to consider a broader range of policies to create conditions for investment.     

Ex ante regulation and co-investment in the transition to next generation access

Investments in next generation access networks (NGANs) ask for a new set of regulatory remedies. This paper contributes to this debate by focusing on three issues: the migration from the legacy copper network to the NGA infrastructure, and how wholesale pricing regulation might affect this process; the introduction of differentiated wholesale remedies according to geographical differences in NGAN deployment; the impact of co-investment decisions on market outcomes and their interplay with access regulation. Using the recent economic literature, arguments and possible guidelines are proposed, which might be useful to regulators and policy makers.     

Investigating the intertwining impact of wholesale access pricing and the commitment to net neutrality principle on European next-generation access networks private investment plans: An options-game application for capturing market players' competitive interactions

Whilst the deployment of next generation access networks (NGANs) is undoubtedly beneficial to the economy, new legal developments in the United States (US) regarding the issue of net neutrality (NN) pose a new challenge not only to policy makers but to telecommunication providers as well, that could justify a fresh approach when assessing NGANs investments. In particular, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) subverted extant NN rules in the US and if the European Union (EU) decides to follow a similar deregulatory path in the future it could change the way telecommunications providers on both sides of the Atlantic lay down their optical-fibre network infrastructure investment plans. For instance, if traffic prioritization is allowed then diversification of revenue sources can be achieved by charging customers for privileged data delivery to their premises. Currently, NGANs roll-out throughout EU is an ongoing process in a setting whereby access regulation in the form of network element unbundling is already imposed. As a result, these legal developments form a new context within which it makes sense to assess the role of NGANs wholesale access pricing in tandem with the degree of commitment to NN rules so as to i) determine their combinatorial impact on private telecommunications operators' financial figures and ii) capture their competitive interactions. Towards this end, an important aspect of particular value to market players (i.e. incumbents and competitive providers – CPs), and policy makers (i.e. National Regulatory Authorities – NRAs) that this article aims to examine is how to employ the option-game (OG) analysis, that reflects the intersection of game theory (GT) and real options (ROs), to model the competitive interactions between participants in a particular competition game set-up by means of deriving possible Nash-equilibrium (NE) outcomes within a regulatory setting part of which is the commitment or non-commitment to the NN principle. This, hybrid, evaluation tool is applied on top of a conventional discounted cash flow (DCF) techno-economic analysis assessment of an NGAN investment opportunity.     

Public and private intervention for next-generation access deployment: Possibilities for three European countries

How next-generation access (NGA) deployment can be encouraged is a challenge that many countries are facing, and one that has been widely and actively discussed around the globe. This discussion has highlighted a dilemma that ultimately shapes investment—how to encourage the widespread deployment of NGA while enabling operators to achieve reasonable returns. This paper focuses on the tensions that arise as a consequence of this investment challenge in three countries – the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom (UK) – and uses the analysis of extensive data collection with k7ey actors to argue the case for the injection of public or private incentives. The paper finds that markets with competitive infrastructure will not benefit from public investment while markets with geographical constraints are in need of public support. The paper also explains that regulatory intervention is necessary in the early stage of NGA roll-out, even in currently competitive markets. In all the discussions it becomes evident that, among the three cases, the UK is most in need of public intervention.     

A study on the deployment of high-speed broadband networks in NUTS3 regions within the framework of digital agenda for Europe

This paper investigates the high-speed broadband situation in the EU and its prospects. It uses a deployment model to estimate the investment required to meet the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE) broadband targets set by the European Commission in its Europe 2020 strategy at different stages: as of 2016, after expected operators’ deployment, after public subsidies and leveraged investment, and as expected in 2020. The model uses data at the NUTS3 level, which is the most granular level that has data available on the status of broadband deployment, to arrive at a coherent and comparable framework. From the different perspectives on the investment to meet DAE targets, the paper concludes on the need for an appropriate combination of incumbent and alternative operators investments, public subsidies and leveraged investments, and new investments, both public and private and non-existing as of 2016, examining their feasibility and the impact of different regulatory, technical, and policy strategies.     

Long term risk sharing contracts as an approach to establish public–private partnerships for investment into next generation access networks

This paper develops an investment/pricing model for the deployment of basic broadband networks which, along with other applications, is applicable to public–private partnership projects. In particular, a new investment model is suggested to be used for finance deployment over a longer term by enabling both private and public investors to participate in the roll-out of next generation access (NGA) infrastructure. This so-called “long-term risk sharing concept” has several notable benefits compared with the traditional regulatory approach. Above all, the model enables both private operators and public authorities to share the risk of investing in NGA infrastructure. Thus the model offers a way for public authorities to achieve a timely and countrywide roll-out of NGA networks, including in areas where NGA investment would otherwise not occur.     

Next Generation Access (NGA) supply side interventions—An international comparison

Over the last years, technical and economic developments towards the deployment of Next Generation (Access) Networks have triggered discussions under which circumstances investments into physical infrastructure are economically viable. In many countries the discussion has arisen regarding conditions under which private investment will/will not be undertaken and whether or not in such cases public policy measures should support deployment. This could come in different ways—from incentivizing private investments to deploying new “state-owned” networks. Public policy can have an impact for example by intervening into a competitive market. The paper tries to provide answers as to “why” such interventions and supply side policies are undertaken (thereby referring to the central role that broadband infrastructures have for the economy) and “how” such interventions take place, for example an analysis of the public policy interventions to drive Next Generation Access Network deployment. The article thereby derives policy patterns that have occurred in different regions of the world.     

应对全球金融危机，强化企业危机管理

在全球金融危机持续扩散,前景不明朗的大背景下,国家大规模基础设施建设的投入,给建筑业带来前所未有的机遇,然而工程投资效益和建筑生产过程的质量安全管理却让人担忧。本文分析了建筑企业施工生产的特殊性,探讨了强化建筑企业危机管理的必要性,从事前预防、事中控制和事后处理的角度提出了建筑企业工程事故危机的应对措施和方案,对促进建筑企业生产经营管理,提升工程事故危机管理能力具有积极意义。     

Take your partners: Public private interplay in Australian and New Zealand plans for next generation broadband

Within a few days of each other in early 2009, the national governments of Australia and New Zealand announced separate plans to invest heavily in advanced broadband networks. Taxpayers in each country will contribute at least half the estimated cost of fibre-to-the-premises networks reaching the overwhelming majority of households and businesses within 8–10 years. These complex and controversial forms of ‘public private interplay’ demonstrate three trends: a shift away from the liberalization and privatization policy consensus of the last two decades; shared convictions about the anticipated size of fast broadband’s economic and social benefits, and about the need for wholesale-only fixed line network operation to maximize those benefits; and the unlikely impact of the global financial and economic crisis in stimulating investment in particular infrastructures seen as critical to the national economies that emerge from it. This article discusses industry structures and regulation in Australia and New Zealand, their long history of public investment in telecommunications and the recent popularity of public private partnerships (PPPs) with Australian state governments. It outlines the ambitious broadband plans and surveys their prospects. Like so many other policy actions following the global economic crisis, these are distinctively national responses to internationally shared challenges.     

Contingencies within dynamic managerial capabilities: interdependent effects of resource investment and deployment on firm performance

Dynamic managerial capabilities focus on managers' resource‐related decisions. Asset orchestration, a central component of dynamic managerial capabilities and of resource management, highlights the importance of integrating (matching) resource investment and deployment decisions. Building on these recent theoretical advances, we examine the contingent nature of resource investment and deployment decisions. The results, based on a sample of banking firms, indicate that firm performance suffers when managers' investment decisions deviate from the norms of rivals for both human and physical capital. However, when deployment decisions support investment decisions, greater investment deviation, both high and low, generally enhances performance. Specifically, firm performance is optimized by making congruent resource investment and deployment decisions as opposed to maximizing or economizing either decision independently. Therefore, resource management via asset orchestration is vital for superior performance. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

对海外资源投资中若干问题的思考

中国企业在近期进行的一些海外收购项目不乏成功案例,但在投资主体、交易方式乃至海外投资的整体思路和长期战略方面有必要进行更深入的研究。近期的全球金融危机为中国企业并购海外能源与矿产资源提供了机会,但是这种机会不是常态。在经济常态的环境中,多样化的投资主体、互利多赢的合作经营、捆绑市场份额的方式等等是中国企业在海外资源投资操作方式上需要认真加以研究的内容之一。日本企业以多种经济成分的商业组织为主,以资本借贷形式与资源国签订长期供应协议的投资方式值得借鉴;成立民间海外投资基金,融合海内外金融资源和人才优势也不失为可供选择的方式。投资目标国的市场需求、就业机会、舆论导向、环保要求和产业结构调整等因素,都应在海外投资的全盘考虑之内。从宏观战略和全球资源配置来看,应建立中国东西部地区国内自我循环圈、"金砖四国"资源与货币之间的大循环圈,并发展中国与非洲国家的深度合作。     

Improving the FTTH business case–A joint telco-utility network rollout model

Fiber to the home networks are seen as the most future proof technology to offer increasing bandwidth to customers. The publication of the Digital Agenda has put forward challenging goals for the broadband connectivity in Europe, but the rollout of next generation fixed access networks is still lagging. One of the reasons is the high initial investment cost associated with the rollout of these networks. To decrease this cost, a cooperation model between utility operators during the deployment phase is proposed in this paper. A model has been developed, in order to optimize the position of the different infrastructures in the trench and to allow for a fair allocation of the different costs incurred between all cooperating parties. The combination of these models has shown that a synergetic deployment phase of new infrastructures, both in Greenfield and Brownfield installations, can decrease the deployment costs for fiber infrastructure up to 21%.     

Collaborative approaches to public sector innovation: A scoping study

In the last 15 years, European countries have invested considerable resources to provide e-government services. Despite of its increasing availability, its level of adoption has not been satisfying. On the other hand, over the last years, coinciding with the web 2.0 trend, the e-government services co-produced by citizens start to appear, often without the support, acknowledgement and even awareness of the government. This trend stems from a well-established tradition of offline co- production of public services, i.e. services provided by the voluntary sector, but brought to an unprecedented scale thanks to the advent of web 2.0. Still, the concept remains not well-defined and its impact is not yet well studied. The paper explores on a limited sets of cases what does it mean to collaboratively deliver online public services; what are the success factors based on the cases under study and what are the incentives for service providers (other than public administration), citizens as users and public administration. The authors propose an ostensive definition of the collaborative delivery of public services: collaborative public services are created and run by government, civil society or by private sector building on the re-use of government data or citizens data. Those services are focused on public goods delivery (e.g. health, education, public transport) and are meant to change the traditional government services by engaging in an open dialogue with public administration about the best way to deliver those services. The analysis of six case studies of innovative collaborative online public services suggests that the online collaborative public service delivery increases its quality with the users׳ growth contrary to the traditional offline service delivery. The study results indicate that the current developers interest lies in delivering complementary services to the government run services rather than substitutive services. The authors propose also the initial list of success factors, enabling conditions, and benefits for all main stakeholders (users, innovators and public administration).     

资源国国家石油公司发展近况

资源国国家石油公司(NOC)资源优势非常明显.2011年,在国际油价高位震荡、国际油气需求快速增长的背景下,资源国NOC的公司收入普遍恢复到金融危机前的水平.资源国NOC重视上游产能建设,普遍制定了开发本国油气资源的多阶段计划；加快发展天然气,结合自身情况设立开发项目；在增加投资开发传统油气资源的同时开始注重非常规资源的开发；进一步重视发展下游业务、延伸产业链,注重培育高附加值业务和开展多样化的国际合作；资源国NOC在进一步加强与IOC合作的同时,与NOC之间的合作日趋频繁.     

Accelerating the development of Latin American digital ecosystem and implications for broadband policy

In the past ten years the Latin American and Caribbean region has been advancing in terms of various digitization metrics, such as the deployment of broadband infrastructure, and the adoption of the Internet and social media. However, despite the significant progress in terms of digitization of consumption,¹ the region faces still some important development challenges of its digital economy. This paper attempts to identify what the future challenges are for Latin America and the Caribbean, which raises a number of research and policy questions: (1) How close is consumer digitization in Latin America and the Caribbean to the levels observed in industrialized countries? (2) How should Latin America and the Caribbean address the broadband and Internet demand gap of the non-adopting population? (3) Are current digitization trends homogeneous across countries in the region or do we observe a divergence across countries, indicating some advanced nations approaching industrialized country performance, while others lagging? (4) If infrastructure and consumer adoption of certain digital products and services is evolving at a fast pace, what are the upcoming digitization challenges? (5) If broadband is a critical lever for the development of digitization, what are the policies to be implemented by Latin American and Caribbean governments to maximize investment for deployment of last generation technologies and promote adoption? To answer these questions the authors have developed, with support of CAF Latin American Development Bank, a comprehensive digitization index. This new index is used to assess the development of Latin America and the Caribbean region vis-à-vis industrialized countries. On this basis, an econometric model is developed to measure the economic development impact of digitization. Zeroing in on broadband as a critical lever for the development of the digital economy, a set of infrastructure investment and adoption goals is defined for different countries in the region. Finally, public policies are recommended to achieving the established goals.     

Public private partnerships as a tool for stimulating investments in broadband

The paper is concerned with PPP in the telecommunications area and more specifically with the combination of public and private investments in upgrading broadband infrastructures. Following the liberalization of the telecommunications area, investments were primarily left to the private sector – though public investments have continued to take place in specific areas such as research and education networks and rural and otherwise underserved areas. Lately, however, governments have upgraded their public investment plans in broadband infrastructures. The question is whether we are witnessing a simple quantitative change or whether this quantitative change includes a qualitative evolvement in the view on the role of the public sector in expanding broadband infrastructures. At the present time, the most likely answer is that increasing public investments in broadband infrastructures signal a combination of concerns raised by the economic crisis and the growing awareness of the social and economic importance of efficient broadband infrastructures.     

On optimal scarcity prices

This article contributes to the debate of missing money (compare Joskow(2007a)). This debate has seriously questioned the desirability of limiting scarcity prices in markets with fluctuating demand by emphasizing their potentially negative impact on firms' investment decisions in the long run. A prominent example are recently liberalized electricity markets, where competition authorities have imposed price caps³ or adopted other measures to mitigate high scarcity prices.The impact of reduced scarcity prices in the long run still is only incompletely explored. We thus analyze investment of firms in base load and peak load technologies in a market with fluctuating demand under imperfect competition. We show that an appropriately chosen limitation of scarcity prices is not only beneficial in the short run but also in the long run. It leads to a strict increase of investment in peak load technologies, leaving investment in base load technologies unchanged. Furthermore, we characterize the optimal limit on scarcity prices.     

金融危机的三个风险和四大机遇并存——中国企业如何在金融危机中把握机遇

今年9月份以来,由美国次贷危机引发的全球金融危机愈演愈烈,华尔街五大投行轰然倒下,全球股市竞相暴跌,世界经济发展开始减速。为了减少和控制金融危机对本国经济的危害,世界主要国家政府紧急出手,一系列救市措施一一注资、降息、减税,接二连三出台。对此,国际货币基金组织总裁卡恩表示,特殊日寸期需要特殊对策。作为世界经济的一部分,中国经济不可避免会受到国际金融危机影响,     

腐败对公共投资和经济增长的效应研究

公共投资对经济增长的积极效应为经济学家普遍认同,但是由于腐败的存在,这一问题变得比较模糊。文章将腐败与经济增长、公共投资与经济增长、腐败与公共投资等三个大的问题纳入一个分析框架下,研究公共投资、腐败和经济增长及其相互依赖的关系。构建了由关于经济增长、公共投资、腐败和私人投资四个方程组成的方程组,并利用三阶段最小二乘法实证分析了观测的面板数据。文章的结论指出,腐败增加了公共投资的水平,但是只有低腐败水平的国家才能享受到公共投资对经济增长的有效回报,而对于高腐败水平的国家,公共投资的效率因为腐败的存在而降低,以致于公共投资无法拉动经济增长。