Historically South Africa has favoured incumbents/national champions over rivalry (competition) in the telecommunications sector. However, the importance of competition has become more apparent with each new development in the sector. Given the changes in this dynamic sector it is important to...

Since the nineteenth century, the state has played different roles in telecommunications, from owner-operator and regulator to facilitator of private sector activities. Whereas direct government involvement has diminished since the 1980s, recent years have witnessed renewed demands for...

Since it became involved in telecommunications during the course of the nineteenth century, the state has played several roles in telecommunications: owner-operator, regulator, facilitator, and stopgap for private sector deficiencies. During the past two decades direct state involvement in...

The European Commission has formally recognised that adequate provision of basic household services, including energy, communications, water and transport, is key to ensuring equity, social cohesion and solidarity. Yet little research has been done on the impact of the reform of these services...

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 has yielded more litigation and less local competition than its supporters expected or intended. Calls for its reform are multiplying. The article diagnoses the 1996 Act's failings and prescribes a framework for reform. The successful deregulations of the...

Little empirical work carefully evaluates the special access market, and even less research has focused explicitly on the effects of deregulation (pricing flexibility). This paper attempts to address that gap in the literature by exploring empirically the relationship between the different types...

Regulatory reform efforts in a broad range of industries have resulted in increased importance of competitive forces as a means to allocate resources and improve economic efficiency. A number of indicators suggest that such forces have been stronger in the United States than in most other OECD...

Two laboratory studies investigated the effect of price transparency on consumers' decision-making in the residential electricity market. The first tested whether consumers have difficulties when confronted with unit prices expressed as discounts from standard rates, which vary between...

Europe has gone through a wave of liberalisation in the last two decades. Measures were first adopted to that effect in the telecommunications sector, which has since then become the sector of electronic communications. They were extended, afterwards, in their substance, to other economic...

This paper deals with the question what the relationship is between consumer activity and non-competitive market outcomes in deregulated markets. These market failures could be the result of bad regulation, bad competition law enforcement or insufficient consumer activity. The different causes...