الگوبرداری تنظیم مقررات ارتباطات رادیویی - شاخص دولتی تنظیم مقررات ارتباطات رادیویی(TRGI)

In this study an index of the effectiveness of the institutional design of telecommunication regulators for 142 countries that belong to the International Telecommunications Union is produced. This index – the Telecommunications Regulatory Governance Index (TRGI) – ranks these countries regionally (The Americas, The EU27, Other Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Northern Africa and Africa) as well as globally. Data from Transparency International are used to measure general political governance for these same 142 countries and show the correspondence or lack thereof between the TRGI and political transparency. Strong empirical evidence is found that countries with better institutions have telecommunication regulators that consistently score higher in the TRGI.

The liberalization of network infrastructures such as electricity, gas and telecommunications and the global trend toward privatization of traditional monopolies have shaped these markets during the last decade. National regulators have been created to establish a level-playing field between incumbents and entrants. The purpose of the present study is to provide a global index measuring regulatory governance in the telecoms sector based on information provided by individual countries and assembled in the International Telecommunications Union annual telecommunications regulatory survey. The ITU provided some additional data; however these data are publicly available. The Telecommunications Regulatory Governance Index (TRGI hereafter) builds on a number of previous studies in a systematic attempt toward effective and objective benchmarking of the quality of telecommunications regulatory governance in each country where a minimum level of competition exists.1,2 A crucial element of the study is the attempt to highlight the importance of the country's “social infrastructure” – the general quality of institutions in each country – and to relate the TRGI to that. In particular an assessment is made as to whether the existence of “good” institutions coincides with a high score in telecommunications regulatory governance. While it might be expected that a high level of institutions generally works to the benefit of regulatory agencies it is shown that there are systematic outliers and discrepancies. The study is organized as follows: first is a review of the literature on telecommunications regulatory governance as well as of a more general political institutional theory. Then, the model is introduced, the various elements and the subcomponents behind the TRGI. Next, are the Index and rankings and then the concept of general political transparency is introduced. Two-by-two quadrant diagrams are used to highlight the correspondence and differences between rankings based on the TRGI and rankings based on general political governance. Some simple econometric analyses are provided and some comments and some points for future research conclude the paper.

In this analysis two major issues are addressed. The first is to provide a consistent measure of regulatory governance across as many countries as possible. This is the first study that has attempted to construct and measure a global index. Second, data have been made available by the ITU and are used to produce a wider range of metrics to measure telecoms regulatory governance. Finally, sector specific governance in telecoms is compared and contrasted with general economy-wide governance and analyzed within four general groupings: (1) countries where both telecoms specific governance and general political governance are relatively “good”; (2) countries where both are relatively “poor”; (3) countries where telecoms regulatory governance is relatively more advanced than general governance, and (4) countries where telecoms governance relatively lags economy-wide governance. There are then specific policy prescriptions for groups of countries. In particular those countries whose regulatory governance relatively lags general governance should be able to quickly improve telecoms specific regulation as general economy-wide institutions are in place. Those countries where telecoms specific governance lags general political governance may have difficulties in enforcing competition and “good” outcomes but no analysis has been undertaken to see if this hypothesis is correct. Some simple econometric analyses are used to determine whether there are regional variations; there is a good deal of research that needs to be done to explain why these patterns exist.