Telecommunications Policies: Determinants and Impact

Abstract

This Paper presents new data, in the form of several indices, on liberalization policies and the independence of regulators for a cross section of countries. These indices are combined with a comprehensive set of performance, institutional and political data to analyze both the determinants and the impact of telecommunications policies. We find that liberalization policies are negatively associated with the degree to which countries have an interventionist tradition, but not with the partisan ideology of reforming governments. We also find that countries with weak protection of investors' quasi-rents by other means, and countries with a larger incumbent, are more prone to create (at least legally) independent regulatory agencies. There is preliminary evidence with this dataset that, when the endogeneity of policies is taken into account, the creation of independent regulatory agencies and pro-entry policies have a significant positive effect on network penetration and a negative effect on productivity.