The impact of telecommunication regulatory policy on mobile retail price in Sub-Saharan African countries

This paper examines the effect of regulatory policies on mobile retail prices. Using quarterly data for 8 African countries for the period 2010:Q4 to 2014:Q4 we estimate structural demand and supply equations. We find that mobile termination rates (MTR) have significant positive impact on mobile retail prices. A decline in average MTR of 10% decreases average mobile retail prices by 2.5%. On the other hand, mobile number portability (MNP) has an insignificant effect on price and subscriptions in selected African countries. This may be due to inadequate implementation of MNP and consecutively low demand for porting numbers. The average market conduct in mobile telecommunications industry for selected African countries can be approximated by Cournot Nash equilibrium, while price elasticity of demand is on average -0.27. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.