Conclusion Conclusion In a report quantifying the potential impact of gender parity on global economic development, the McKinsey Institute concluded that “economic development enables countries to close gender gaps, but progress in four areas in particular— education level, financial and digital inclusion, legal protection, and unpaid care work—could help accelerate progress.”280 This study has particularly focused on strengthening digital inclusion, but recognizes that women’s lived experienced in all four areas is inextricably intertwined with and governed by gender norms that shape culturally accepted roles and expectations—in particular, those regulating access and control over resources and decisionmaking—for men and women, girls and boys. To understand the potential for progress towards full digital inclusion as a fundamental component of economic development in Myanmar, it is useful to highlight several characteristics of the political economy in Myanmar in 2017 that may constrain full implementation of the recommendations made in this report. First, a recent PEA that examined the potential for liberalization of rice production in Myanmar in 2015 contained several observations on political economy constraints that are also relevant to liberalization of the telecommunications sector and investment-related ICT reforms overall, primarily 1) deep distrust of market-led development among Myanmar’s political leaders as a result of isolation from functioning markets for over two generations; and 2) the existence of vested economic interests that previously prevented foreign direct investment.281 The latter is perhaps mitigated somewhat in the telecommunications sector, where potential profits—albeit now shared with private foreign firms—from the rapidly increasing user base may offset the loss of revenues once enjoyed by the state-owned monopoly over a much smaller market. In addition to these two factors, the continued influence of political players from earlier regimes functions as a brake to infrastructure- and revenue-related reforms that upset the established web of interdependent relationships, from the president’s cabinet to the township level. Even those moderate stakeholders who did not directly benefit from economic interests that actively prevented foreign investment are engaged in an ongoing process of renegotiating power dynamics, rents, and other prerequisites of their new positions—whether elected, appointed, or vis-à-vis new foreign competitors. For example, it has been noted that the USDP is now “legislatively impotent,” with only 6 percent of seats following the 2015 elections,282 yet it retains considerable spoiler power through USDP leader Thura Shwe’s new legal advisory body within the union hluttaw and behind the scenes through innumerable USDP loyalists and their cronies. The NLD also effectively displaced the ethnic parties in the union parliament, which collectively hold only 9 percent of seats in the new union legislature, and have voiced their displeasure that the NLD appointed exclusively “Applied PEA research makes connections between national level policies and local level realities, breaking down obstacles into manageable parts and determining possible approaches that can trigger new ways of addressing seemingly intractable problems.” —USAID, A Summary of Lessons Learned, 2016 NLD representatives as chief ministers to the fourteen regional bodies.283 McKinsey, “Offline and Falling Behind.” Vikram Nehru, “The Political Economy of Reform in Myanmar: The Case of Rice and the Need for Patience,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, October 21, 2015. 282 International Crisis Group, Myanmar’s New Government. 283 Ibid. 280 281 Ending the Gender Digital Divide in Myanmar: A Problem-Driven Political Economy Assessment | 91