ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of the World Bank in creating the links, outlined theoretically in chapter 3, between new investment in telecommunications and global financial integration in developing countries. The chapter focuses on telecommunications and on the construction of an urgent need for accelerated investment in the telephone infrastructure of developing countries. Development planners, including those at the World Bank, long couched the need for more telecommunications capacity in a familiar language of prerequisites for growth in industry, commerce, services, and other sectors. Since the late 1980s, however, led by U.S. officials and private telephone company interests, the promotion of investment in telecommunications has become increasingly draped in the language of privatization and liberalization. Talk is cheap, and, in fact, there has been much more talk about privatization than there has been wholesale privatization of telephone service supply. Nonetheless, over the last half decade, World Bank time and money have become effective forms of leverage for privatization.
