Regulatory federalism and industrial policy in broadband telecommunications

Daniel Montolio and Francesc Trillas

Information Economics and Policy, 2013, vol. 25, issue 1, 18-31

Abstract: We analyse the impact of regulation, industrial policy and jurisdictional allocation on broadband deployment using a theoretical model and an empirical estimation. Although central powers may be more focused and internalize inter-jurisdictional externalities, decentralized powers may internalize local horizontal policy spillovers and use a diversity of objectives as a commitment device in the presence of sunk investments. The latter may, for instance, alleviate the collective action problem of the joint use of rights of way and other physical infrastructures. In the empirical exercise, using data for OECD and EU countries for the period 1999–2006, we examine whether centralization promotes new telecommunications markets, in particular the broadband access market. The existing literature, in the main, claims it does, but we find no support for this claim in our data. Our results show that indicators of national industrial policy are a weakly positive determinant of broadband deployment and that different measures of centralization are either irrelevant or have a negative impact on broadband penetration.

Keywords: Regulation; Industrial policy; Decentralization; Telecommunications; Broadband investment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H77 K23 L50 L96 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016762451300005X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Regulatory federalism and industrial policy in broadband telecommunications (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:iepoli:v:25:y:2013:i:1:p:18-31

DOI: 10.1016/j.infoecopol.2013.01.002

Access Statistics for this article

Information Economics and Policy is currently edited by D. Waterman

More articles in Information Economics and Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().