Regulatory Reform in Small Developing States: Globalisation, Regulatory Autonomy and Jamaican Telecommunications

Globalisation is claimed to have altered the capacities of states to regulate. Small developing countries, in particular, are said to have lost boundary control over their national economies. This, combined with policies of privatisation and public sector reform more generally, has led scholars to suggest that we are living in the age of the ‘hollow’, ‘defective’ or ‘diminished’ state. At the same time, the term ‘globalisation ’ has been widely applied and abused, and debates between ‘hyperglobalists ’, ‘sceptics’ and ‘transformationalists ’ may have reached their saturation point. This article seeks to add to the empirical work on which such broad claims can be assessed by using the example of Jamaican telecommunications. Providing and regulating telecommunications has traditionally been regarded as one of the deŽ ning activities of the modern state. More recently, due to economic and technological developments, telecommunications are said to have become even more important for national economies. This is also a policy domain in which global factors are arguably most pervasive. Jamaica has undergone a decade of regulatory reform of its telecommunications sector, culminating in the passage of a new Telecommunications Act in 2000. The case is used to clarify the ways effects attributed to ‘globalisation ’ alter the ability of a small developing state to establish regulatory autonomy in one signiŽ cant policy domain, telecommunications . A variety of perspectives have considered the relative autonomy of Caribbean countries vis-à-vis the wider political context. For example, Sutton stresses the consequences of ‘living in the shadow’ of the USA, which has resorted to policies of destabilisation , assassination or even outright invasion. Others, such as Maingot, offer more pluralist ‘complex interdependence’ interpretations of this relationship . Nonetheless, it is widely accepted that international politics substantially constrain national policy making in the Caribbean. In the telecommunications sector in the Caribbean, this has led to claims of ‘tele-colonial domination by metropolitan telecommunications carriers and suppliers’ and