trading and promote colocation and infrastructure sharing, etc). There are a number of measures that governments can take to promote an enabling framework for greater investment despite a lack of readily available credit, before (or in addition to) resorting to funding. Developing countries with limited resources available for stimulus plans can consider undertaking other measures to promote greater private investment. Furthermore, broadband stimulus plans create risks that governments engage in ‘picking technologies’, ‘picking winners’ and ‘picking communities’. There are also likely to be consequences for competition in whether state financing could tilt the playing field and implicitly favor incumbents with extensive established backbone networks. Stimulus plans must be designed carefully in such a way as to minimize these dangers. It is important to address these issues upfront to ensure that stimulus funds are well-spent to the benefit of the industry, consumers and society. To date, stimulus plans in developing countries have tended to focus on other, more urgent needs in housing, sanitation and transport infrastructure and may have failed to prioritize ICT infrastructure to a large degree, missing out on the stronger marginal impacts of ICT investments on supply and productivity. In this respect, developing countries may be neglecting a great development opportunity of the economic benefits broadband infrastructure can bring (Insight 9). If industrialized countries forge ahead with state-subsidized investments in high-bandwidth networks, developing countries may again find themselves on the wrong side of a growing digital divide. In reality, this emphasis on funding models in response to the financial crisis and compensating for financing difficulties for operators may overlook other more simple and immediate measures that governments (and regulators) can take to promote private sector investment by reforming taxation, promoting competition, creating greater regulatory clarity and certainty and/or resolving spectrum issues (for example, governments can accelerate the transition to digital TV to free up spectrum more quickly, simplify licensing procedures, optimize spectrum allocation through refarming or spectrum 11