Diffusion of regulatory Policy Across Nations: The Example of Number Portability

Out of around 200 countries in the world, only 75 have number portability. What are the international factors that explain the diffusion of this regulatory policy? Research on policy diffusion offers several explanations: constructivist, coercion, competition, and learning. Each of these theories is explored based on a dataset that tracks the implementation of number portability, fixed phone competition and mobile phone competition, and documentary evidence gathered from the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), COMESA (Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), European Union, and the Inter-American Telecommunications Commission (CITEL). In these three regulatory issue areas, Asia, Americas, and Europe are the three regions that innovate first; Middle East and Africa follow later on. Further, Hong Kong and New Zealand in Asia and Canada, Chile, and the US in Americas are pioneers, while others wait to see results before proceeding; learning appears to explain the diffusion pattern in these regions. In contrast, in Europe, regulatory diffusion begins early and proceeds rapidly with pioneers like Finland and United Kingdom, but others adopt without the lag time observed in Asia and Americas, very likely because of the leadership and enforcement powers of the European Union, a coercive explanation among member states and a competitive one among non-member states.