The impact of ICT on the efficiency of different national telecommunication industries of the US, Germany, France, the UK and the Netherlands is analysed by using a stochastic production possibility frontier approach. The relative inefficiencies of these industries measured as distances to the general production possibility frontier are estimated by a multi-country panel maximum-likelihood-estimation. By determining the technology efficiency effect frontiers for each single country one obtains a measure for the evolution of relative inefficiencies over time for each country's industry. Looking at these different patterns a common characteristic shape of stylised J-curves is revealed. This can be interpreted as J-curves of adoption of innovations in different national telecommunication industries. Since the troughs of these J-curves occur in different years for different countries a phase delay in adoption of innovations occurs differing from country to country. The time period covered by the data include a time when the deregulation of the telecommunication industries in these countries took place and the rapid diffusion of two key innovations - the Internet and mobile communications - changed the technological and organisational foundations everywhere. The results show that even if the US telecommunication industry led in this wave of major innovations as a first mover in comparison to the others and diminished by this their relative efficiency disadvantage opposite the European countries the EU countries still maintain a comparative efficiency advantage inherited from the early 1980's. In particular after their delayed adoption of the recent innovations like deregulation and Internet began there during the late 1990's the rapid catch up of the US telecommunication industry relative to the European industries has stalled. However, overall the inefficiency differences between national telecommunication industries have decreased in the long-run. Differences in the capability to establish and maintain a competitive and innovative national industry, however, still prevail between these countries even if they have become less pronounced as before.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research in its series Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin with number
621.
Length: 24 p. Date of creation: 2006 Date of revision: Publication status: Published in: Communications & Strategies 60 (2005) 157-179 Handle: RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp621
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Did you know? You can import bibliographic info in various formats into you bibliographic tool, or just into your word processor. See under "publisher info" on each abstract page.