The implications of the liberalization in telecommunication markets for market structure and price policy: evidence from a small open economy

This study analyses the impact of liberalization on market structure and pricing in the Greek telecommunication market from 1992 to 2005. The data refers to 44 of the most prominent companies of fixed telephony, mobile telephony and internet services and was compiled by means of interviews with the help of a questionnaire. Our descriptive analysis concluded that liberalization of the telecommunication market reduced its concentration degree, increased competition and induced price cuts. This conclusion is supported by other research studies concerning other countries of the EU, since Greece as an EU member country has also implemented the respective European policy in the specific industry. As far as the econometric level is concerned, we used panel Feasible Generalized Least Squares (FGLS). FGLS is an appropriate tool for samples such as our own, composed by intersectoral data that extend to more than one time periods, and without correlation between the unobserved effects and the interpretative variables. Our econometric research showed that both private ownership and specialized personnel in the commercial and technical sector seem to positively influence the companies' market share. In turn, a large market share offers companies more freedom to cut down prices in their services. However, there is still considerable need for econometric research in this field.