Who benefits from telecommunication trade liberalization?
So to the third question: what are the benefits of trade liberalization? Freer trade in telecommunications promises to deliver at least three economic gains: new and improved products and services, lower prices and additional investment. Open trade in telecommunication services should result in more competition, lowering prices for most businesses and for many consumers and providing both with a choice of different service providers. Probably the clearest evidence comes from the market segment where competition is currently the most keen: in international telephone services. Those markets where direct competition is permitted have achieved higher rates of growth than countries that have retained a monopoly. For developed economies, this difference is significant; competition has raised the growth rate of traffic per subscriber from 5.6 per cent to 9.3 per cent per year since 1990. However, for emerging markets the difference is much more striking: over the same period competitive marke
