For The Faroe Islands, Please Dial 298

Has anyone ever thought about how countries received their international calling codes?  When I was researching vacation destinations, I noticed that Mongolia's code is 976 and Laos's code is 856.  As a contrast, Japan's code is 81, Peru's code is 51, the US is just 1, and France is 33.  It makes me wonder if they were assigned by the order in which countries received international telephone service since there is definitely a correlation between the current level of economic development and the code given.  Europe, the West, and all of the industrialized or internationally important countries have low numbers (Australia-61, Spain-34, Russia-7), Eastern European countries have middle numbers (Albania-355, Macedonia-389), while countries that are very underdeveloped or that no one has ever heard of have very high numbers (Bangladesh-880, Krygyzstan-996, Mayotte-2696).  However, the obvious outlier is Africa.  It looks like all of the African countries have numbers in the 200's (Benin-229, Liberia-231, Mali-223), so the assignments cannot be completely based on economic development.  Nor, however, can they be geographically based since Malaysia is 60 and Laos is 856.  So maybe it does have to do with the order in which countries became plugged into the international calling or telegraph system.  Africa's codes actually support this argument since most of them were colonies of European powers and would have received international telegraph or telephone service fairly early.  Of course, all of Central America is in the middle group, but Spain never invested very heavily in the infrastructure of its colonies, so Central America doesn't necessarily refute the theory.  Interesting.  Anyone else have any thoughts or ideas?