Paving the way for better telecom performance: Evidence from the telecommunication sector in MENA countries

Riham Ezzat

Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne

Abstract: Since the 1980s, developing countries started adopting telecom reforms due to pressures from international institutions. However, Middle East and North African (MENA) countries lagged in adopting such reforms. Even after introducing telecom reforms in the MENA region beginning in 1995, not all countries became better off in terms of various performance indicators. Therefore, this paper empirically assesses the effects of regulation, privatization and liberalization reforms, as well as their simultaneous presences, in the telecommunication sector on the sector's performance using a sample of 17 MENA countries for the period 1995-2010. We assume that different reforms are affected by institutional, political and economic variables with respect to the level of democracy, the legal origin, the natural resources rents per country and the year of independence from colonization. We correct for the endogeneity of telecom reforms, and we use IV-2SLS (Instrumental Variable-Two Stages Least Squares) estimation to analyze their effect on telecom performance in terms of access, productivity and affordability. We find that the privatization of the main incumbent operator and the fixed-line market's liberalization affect the sector's performance negatively in terms of fixed access and affordability. Moreover, we find that the simultaneous presence of an independent regulator and a privatized incumbent helps to eliminate the drawbacks on the sector performance resulting from privatization. However, the simultaneous presences of the other reforms in terms of regulation-competition and privatization-fixed competition do not help to improve the sector's performance

Keywords: Regulation; privatization; competition; Telecom industry; MENA region (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L11 L14 L33 L43 L51 L96 O38 O50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2015-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara, nep-com and nep-eff
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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ftp://mse.univ-paris1.fr/pub/mse/CES2015/15039.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Paving the way for better telecom performance: Evidence from the telecommunication sector in MENA countries (2015)
Working Paper: Paving the way for better telecom performance: Evidence from the telecommunication sector in MENA countries (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mse:cesdoc:15039

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