Abstract
The telecommunications sector is a significant area of infrastructure, which can provide services and help many other sectors to increase their capacity for development. Telecommunications development is now at the top of the policy agenda. In the World Bank report, infrastructure-related privatisation dominated the privatisation scenario in the 1990s, capturing more than 40 per cent of proceeds and telecommunications sectors account for more than 20 per cent of that. Moreover, modem and inexpensive telecommunications have become the major determinant of economic competitiveness. Telecommunications development used to be a special problem only for developing countries, like Taiwan. It is too early to say it is successful or failed, but we can, no doubt, learn some lessons from experiences of other DCs towards the successful telecommunications reform. Consequent1y, some lessons from DCs suggest that privatisation of GOTEs requires developing a competitive market structure and a regulatory environment that offers the new operators incentives and obligations to invest and perform as well as institutional arrangement that frees the operators from unwarranted controls yet protects users and settles commercial interests with wider development objectives. The relationship between competition and regulation also shows that privatisation cannot be a solution to everything, and that it is too early to say how effective they will be in the longer run in meeting sectoral and national development goals, in particular, privatisation brings to the force central issue of competition, pricing policy, and regulation. In the end, we can say privatisation, competition, and regulation are closely intertwined with each other and significant essential elements in the complex process of telecommunications reform.