Financing and other issues in telecommunications development

Implementation of telecommunications infrastructure throughout developing countries is a prerequisite to national development. The fundamental question, argues Dr Parker, is how can developing countries pay for the capital investment in the necessary telecommunications equipment. The need is to encourage an institutional structure that can stimulate innovative, lower-cost appropriate rural telecommunications technologies without imposing excessive risks on the national telecommunications monopoly. With sucessful models to follow, it will be easier to achieve consensus between developing country borrowers, international lenders and telecommunications manufacturers.     

Roger Lowenstein. Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and Its Undoing. New York: Penguin, 2004. ix + 270 pp. ISBN 1-59420-003-3, $24.95 (cloth); 0-14-303-467-7, $15.00 (paper).

What happened on Wall Street from 1997 to 2002 was a financialversion of the perfect storm. Almost everything that could gowrong did go wrong simultaneously. The Securities and ExchangeCommission reforms of the 1930s had closed many of the loopholesfor chicanery, but new paths to questionable practices and debasedprinciples eventually emerged. In his examination of the originsof the "dot.com bubble" and the circumstances of the balloon’sbursting, Roger Lowenstein narrates clearly     

Die prämienbegünstigte Zukunftsvorsorge in Österreich

Due to the predictable demographic developments and the budgetary restrictions in the Stability Pact of the Treaty of Maastricht the big pay-as-you-go public sector pension systems in many western European countries seem to have reached their limits. Since 2003 the Austrian government has put its trust in strengthening the third pillar of the pension system and supports private provision with state-aided premiums. In this paper this state-aided private provision system with its capital guarantee is presented, evaluated and analyzed. Moreover we point out the dilemma of this pension provision product: in the case of low asset returns the state premiums will be eroded by the expenses of the issuers. Furthermore it will be clarified that the issuers, in contrast to the clients, have no interest in investing in volatile assets since in that case the probability of exercising the capital guarantee will increase.