Measuring Effectiveness of Telecom Regulation Using Perception Surveys

The Telecom Regulatory Environment (TRE) survey presented in this paper is a tool to evaluate the effectiveness of the Telecom Regulatory and Policy Environment of a country. It asks senior stakeholders to assess the effectiveness (efficacy) of the regulatory and policy environment in the telecom sector of a country along seven dimensions. The dimensions are based on the General Agreement for Trade in Services (GATS) regulatory reference paper on telecommunications, with some additions. Three telecom subsectors of fixed, mobile and broadband are evaluated separately. The evaluation is done on a Likert scale of one to five. The stakeholders are selected to represent in a balanced manner those directly affected by regulation and policy (such as operators and equipment manufacturers), those observing the sector with broader interest and affected by its overall performance (such as lawyers, consultants, investment analysts) and those representing consumer interests (such as civil society organizations, other government institutions). Equal weight is given to each sub-group of stakeholders in order to ensure that a range of views are represented in the final score. The results can be used to diagnose the positives and negatives of a country’s regulatory environment. When multiple countries are surveyed, resulting comparisons can give insight into best or worst practices and act as tool for leaning. For investors who are evaluating investment options in multiple countries, the TRE scores can act as a proxy indicator for regulatory risk. The paper surveys the literature on measuring regulatory performance in infrastructure sectors, describes the TRE methodology and discusses the results from implementing the survey in 2006 and 2008 in a number of South and South East Asian countries.