When good intentions are not enough: sequential entry and competition in the Turkish mobile industry

A decade into the liberalization of the Turkish mobile industry, the sector remains one of the most concentrated in Europe. In this paper we analyze the links between the regulatory environment and competitive outcomes in the Turkish context. We argue that seven years of duopoly incumbency resulted in a significant first-mover advantage. We then focus on the role of the regulatory tools that could potentially restrain the incumbent operators’ first-mover advantage and stimulate competition: national roaming, interconnection regulation, and number portability

Introducing Competition in the French Electricity Supply Industry: The Destabilisation of a Public Hierarchy in an Open Institutional Environment

The French electricity supply industry is characterized by a vertically integrated monopoly and public ownership and when the government introduced market rules, it was with the aim of preserving the integration of the public incumbent as a national champion. This had two paradoxical effects in favour of competition development and the building of safeguards for entrants

Working for the ‘Free’ Market: state complicity in routine corporate harm in the United Kingdom

This paper documents two forms of harms which are not ‘dramatic’, in fact, each is very low level, and each represents an instance of routine, normalized forms of harm which emanate from the business sector, and in the production of which the state is complicit. The focus specifically here is, in the first substantial section of the paper, on the economic harms produced by the retail sector of the UK financial services industry and, in the second, on the level and scale of airborne pollution in the UK from a range of business sources. While they are very different, they in fact have a lot in common, and tell us a lot about business and state practices. The remainder of the paper considers these state practices at length: despite misunderstandings and claims that governments are withdrawing from free markets, what one finds is a torrent of state intervention designed to create conditions of non-interventionism. It is no mere bystander to these harms, but intimately complicit in them through, variously, deregulation, reregulation and non-enforcement of law... Such state practices are documented in the third part of the paper, which focuses on what is termed regulatory re-shaping by central Governments in the UK since 1997. The results of such state activity may render such harms more likely, even more normalized. In conclusion, the paper considers briefly the relationship between rendering such harms visible and effective resistance to them

Glass half empty? politics and institutions in the liberalization of the fixed line telecommunications industry in Turkey

This chapter reviews Turkish experience with reform of the fixed line telecommunications industry. It provides an account of earlier incoherent attempts to privatize the incumbent operator in the absence of any regulatory framework or political consensus. It also describes the regulatory framework emerged in early 2000s and discusses the various political-economic and institutional factors behind its weak implementation, and hence its limited success in promoting competition