I arrived in Geneva this morning greeted by blue skies, an azure Lake and a gentle, warm summer breeze – oh and Aziz a very friendly and helpful taxi driver! I spent most of the morning discussing international trends in ICT and how developing and emerging economies are (or are not) observing these trends with the acting head of the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), Mr Mohammed Sharil Tarmizi. The MCMC is a corporatized arm of the Government of Malaysia responsible for regulating the media and communications industry in the country. The MCMC is similiar in nature and function as the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).

What Mr Tarmizi and I agreed was that a number of developing and emerging economies have enjoyed tremendous boosts to productivity as a result of mobile telephony adoption and now high penetration rates – Malaysia for example in as little as six years has 100% mobile penetration – but these countries need to re-invest the returns from some of this productivity back into greater internal network and international gateway capacities, to avoid slipping back again once developed countries surge ahead. We discussed the boon to the economy that the Multimedia Super Corridor project had to the Malaysian economy: between 2000 and 2006 the ICT sector in Malaysia grew from 20 billion ringgit to 100 billion (about AU7 billion to AU33 billion). We also discussed how Malaysia undertook this project through visionary leadership and proper resourcing and implementation of the policy commitment made in the late 1990s to craft the Malaysian ICT sector to feed particular national economic comparative advantages. Malaysia is likely to emerge from a developing country status within the next decade.