facturing capabilities needed to bring new telecommunication technologies and techniques to market. These are needed in order to reduce costs and increase added value. This is needed to reduce return on investment time scales - a virtuous circle within a virtuous cycle. The same principles almost certainly apply to other national economies. The only difference is that it is challenging to create a nationally specific source of telecommunications engineering expertise from a virtually zero start point. 12.7.3 The Advantage of an Autocracy? Taking Malaysia as a reference example, Dr Mahathir's political power base and initial lack of democratic accountability allowed for a number of ambitious projects to be undertaken of which telecommunications investment was one, but given that these were substantially financed by inward investment implied that they would be vulnerable to shifts in international investment sentiment that in turn would prompt political change and SO it was. The pattern has been repeated in many countries since, both in the Middle East and in Europe (Portugal and Ireland). Similarly, China is creating a potentially world-beating home-grown telecommunications R and D and manufacturing capability at a speed that is probably only possible in a closely Making Telecoms Work coupled command economy. India could potentially do the same though political and industrial policy making in India is traditionally elliptic, which tends to slow things down. At a recent conference in Cambridge one of the speakers with experience of selling China and India pointed out that regulatory policy does not always align with political policy. In China, as an example, the political system remains communist, but the regulatory system is capitalist. 12.7.4 UK, US and ROW (Rest of the World) Implications What does this mean for the telecommunications industry in the UK, US and rest of the world? It seems unlikely that either the UK or US will adopt autocracy as an acceptable method for accelerating technology investment, though