This thesis consists of three research projects on the telecommunications industry in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) countries. These projects deal with, respectively, the relationship between economic growth and telecommunications infrastructure, the measurement of barriers to trade and investment, and the impact of trade and investment liberalization on economic growth.
In the first project, I examine the contributions of the telecommunications industry to economic growth in the APEC countries, taking into account country fixed effects and causality between telecommunication variables and income, with four structural equations estimated simultaneously. The findings from this project suggest that: models with fixed effects perform better than those without; models that include cellular mobile phones as a proxy for telecommunications infrastructure outperform those with only fixed lines; countries with lower penetration rates tend to demonstrate a higher impact of telecommunications on aggregate output; network externalities exist in those countries that achieve a penetration rate of up to 50 per cent. Together, these findings suggest that the developing countries may achieve faster economic growth by significantly improving their telecommunications infrastructure.
Projects two and three are conducted to test the hypothesis that liberalization of telecommunications market will stimulate investment in telecommunications infrastructure and enhance economic growth. In project two, I construct a set of indices to measure the openness of the telecommunications market in the APEC countries. It is evident that developed economies do not always have higher levels of market liberalization when different instruments such as market access, national treatment and/or regulatory principles are utilized. Some developing economies are more open than their developed counterparts in some aspects.
In project three, I use these indices to estimate the likely impact of liberalization on economic growth. I find some evidence that too great a degree of market liberalization may, surprisingly, lower the investment in telecommunications and hence harm the economic growth in developing countries. I estimate that the adverse impact of full trade liberalization on developing countries is about 5.3 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/29735 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Lim, Eng Kooi |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 136 p. |
Page generated in 0.0015 seconds