Do Telecom Restrictive Policies Matter for Telecom Performance? Evidence from MENA Countries

Riham Ezzat and Nora Aboushady ()

No 949, Working Papers from Economic Research Forum

Abstract: The past decade has witnessed a significant transformation in the trade and regulatory policies of the telecom sector across the MENA region. Many countries committed to opening up their telecom sector to trade and investment under WTO commitments. However, these commitments do not always reflect actual policies. Although some MENA countries started easing telecom market restrictions and tended to adopt more open policies, other countries are still reluctant to change and continue to adopt highly restrictive policies limiting foreign ownership and control in the market. This paper empirically assesses the impact of the existing telecom restrictions on landline and mobile sector performance, using the World Bank Services Trade Restrictiveness Database (STRD), with a focus on MENA countries. We use three-stage least squares-Seemingly Unrelated Regression (3SLS-SUR) to test for the effect of restrictions and the level of competition in the telecom sector on selected performance indicators. Our findings suggest that restrictive telecom policies are more likely to affect landline rather than mobile communications. Moreover, being a MENA country affects the level of competition in the landline market. MENA countries are very protective of their incumbent operators, irrespective of the stipulated legal restrictions in place.

Pages: 25
Date: 2015-09, Revised 2015-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara, nep-int and nep-pay
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published by The Economic Research Forum (ERF)

Downloads: (external link)
http://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/949.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/949.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/949.pdf)
http://erf.org.eg/publications/do-telecom-restrict ... from-mena-countries/ (text/html)

Related works:
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:erg:wpaper:949

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Economic Research Forum Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Namees Nabeel ().