On the assessment of regulators' efficiency: an application to European telecommunications

This paper offers a methodology to assess the internal productive efficiency of National Regulatory Authorities (NRAs) based on the performances of regulated markets, measured in terms of the degree of market efficiency (either static or dynamic). The estimation procedure is based on a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), along with a smoothed bootstrap method and it is applied to telecommunications sector across 18 European countries, 5 of which are new accession countries, in 2005. After the discussion of several desirable outcomes for a telecom regulator, we construct an ad hoc database containing information about NRAs regulatory inputs and outputs. We run three bootstrapped DEAs in order to rank NRAs according to their efficiency in carrying out their regulatory activities. We find the NRAs in 2004 accession countries are more efficient in pursuing dynamic efficiency goals than the more experienced NRAs, while they perform generally worse when the regulatory outcomes are measured in terms of retail efficiency.