Application of Qualitative Comparative Analysis: Competition Environment in Five Countries

Abstract

This paper presents a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) of the telecom market in five countries namely USA, UK, Australia, Japan and Brazil. It highlights the diversity and similarity in competition environments across the countries. The paper brings out a set of common policy initiatives that these five countries have implemented called as the necessary conditions. It also provides a set of alternative combination of policy initiatives that some of the countries have implemented, this set is the sufficient conditions. Thus this paper shows that different causal paths – each path being relevant, in a distinct way – may lead to the same outcome in competition regulation. For the five countries studied, it is found that Opening up of Essential Facilities (OEF), Regulating Prices (RP), Unified and Multi-service Licensing (UML), Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO), Infrastructure Sharing (IS) and Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) are the necessary pre-conditions for a country to have an Effective Environment for Competition.The combination of variables like Opening up of Essential Facilities (OEL), Regulating Prices (RP), Spectrum Trading and Leasing (STL), Unified and Multi-service Licensing(UML), Mobile Virtual Network Operator( MVNO),Infrastructure Sharing (IS) and Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) are observed in four countries USA,UK, Brazil and Australia. Whereas, combination of variables like Opening up of Essential Facilities(OEL), Regulating Prices (RP), Unified and Multi-service Licensing (UML), Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO),Infrastructure Sharing (IS) and Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) is observed in Japan.