Estimating efficiency and productivity changes and impacts of external factors on efficiency level of the telecommunications industry: OECD and mongolian cases

Abstract

Efficiency and productivity analyses are considered to be a comprehensive tool for assessing the performance of any economic agent. For the telecommunications industry such analysis has being the focus of academic studies for various time periods covering different levels of the industry, at a global, regional, national or firm level.Until recently, this type of study has focused on the impacts and outcomes of global phenomena on the performance of the industry including deregulation and privatization of incumbent public telecommunications companies, establishment of an independent regulatory body, technology aspects.The industry is witnessing changes and challenges caused by technological progress and newly emerging and ever increasing data driven services. In such dynamic situations and time dimension, interests in the characteristics of efficiency and productivity of the telecommunications industry are again rising. Circumstances require that an assessment of efficiency and productivity be made in a broader scope with and account for the macroeconomic context and most influential technology factors and to provide the latest evidence to be useful for the next round of policy development.With objective of meeting these requirements, the current dissertation has two aims. First of all, it aims to identify the impacts and extent of macroeconomic factors on the efficiency level of the telecommunications industry, the total factor productivity growth of 16 OECD countries, and their trends over the years. Secondly, the goal is to provide recent evidence and patterns of TFP growth of the telecommunications industry in these countries, and the Mongolian mobile communications industry as a representative of small developing countries with a transition economy. The first part of the dissertation analyses technical efficiency levels and TFP growth of 16 OECD countries for the period 1987-2011 using the stochastic frontier analysis method. The average technical efficien...