The productivity effects of the liberalization of Japanese telecommunication policy

In the early 1980s, the Japanese government decided to pursue policies of liberalization that opened Japan's telecommunication market to competition and moved toward the privatization of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), the dominant domestic telecommunication service provider. The purpose of this paper is to assess the effects of liberalization on the productive performance of NTT. To assess the productive consequences of liberalization, we first provide basic productivity measures for NTT. The Total Factor Productivity (TFP) measures are then decomposed to separate out the effects of liberalization from other factors such as scale, technology, and capacity utilization. The TFP decomposition is based on the parameter estimates of a dynamic cost model.During the 1958–87 period, NTT's TFP level increased at an average annual rate of 3.4%. However, TFP improved at a significantly faster rate following the decision to adopt policies of liberalization. The NTT's average annual TFP growth rate was 5.12% for the 1982–87 period as compared to a 0.26% per year growth rate for the previous five year (1977–82) period. The decomposition of TFP growth appears to indicate that liberalization was a major source of productivity improvement for NTT.