(Ecofin Agency) - The government of Madagascar has brought telecom excise duty back at 10% as tax reduction “did not yield expected results on tariffs,” according to the Ministry of Economy and Finance. The information was reported last week during a session on the new tax measures in the 2020 Finance Act.

The government says that not only did tariffs not drop as expected, but the tax reduction also deprived the treasury of substantial revenues. In its 2020 Global Broadband Pricing Report, cable.co.uk found that Madagascar remains one of the countries in the world where access to broadband connectivity is very expensive. Of the 206 nations featured in this ranking of the most affordable to less affordable tariffs, Madagascar is 150^th behind Mauritius, Mali, Somalia, Senegal and Niger.

At the time the government decided to cut the telecom excise duty to 8%, Patrick Pisal Hamida who manages the mobile operator Telma had pleaded for a further reduction to 5% saying “Telma would cut the price of optical fiber connectivity for the wide public by 10% for every 1% reduction of the excise duty […] when the tax gets reduced to 5%, tariffs get halved.” But operators did not honor their promises, the government observed.