, because it currently takes 3 times the phone’s cost to register foreign originated phones to use permanently inside my country.

That sounds like the stupidest tech thing I've heard this week. Where is this? In my country and at least in every nearby country that I'm aware of, there's a flat cost to registering a phone to operate and while it is a cost, it's not too much (nowhere near the full cost of a pjone in the market, defo) and the only really annoying part of the process is that it somehow takes four whole weeks.