Radio Spectrum Policy Reform in Developing Countries

The traditional "command and control" spectrum management regime has been implemented for many decades in many countries. However, such a regime has proven inefficient from both technical and economic perspectives given increasing demands on spectrum and newly emerging services and applications. This has then called for a new initiative in many countries to review their current policies in a process called "radio spectrum policy reform". Such a reform, while improving the classical command and control scheme, may adopt one of two approaches or a hybrid of them: spectrum trading or spectrum commons. This paper shows that although spectrum commons may attain better opportunities for the developing countries more than those offered by spectrum trading, the right balance between the two approaches is expected to yield better efficiency.