Access Regulation and Broadband Deployment: Evidence from a Worldwide Dataset

This paper explores whether the differences in national regulatory policy practices explain gaps in the fixed broadband uptake across countries worldwide. In doing this, we consider a dataset covering 107 developed and developing countries during 2004–2015. Based on data about regulatory practices gathered from several relevant sources, we compute an index to quantify the degree of regulation in the fixed telecommunication segment. Overall, our findings exhibit clearly an inverted U-shape relationship, meaning that high degrees of regulation harm broadband investment. However, isolating the behavior of the least developing countries from the rest of our worldwide panel, we obtain different results. In fact, access regulation is a relatively recent practice in many developing countries. Moreover, the use of this novel data set has allowed us to investigate the specific impact of each one of these regulatory policies. We argue that most findings are in line with the theoretical predictions.