Theoretical And Empirical Study On Workable Competition In The Telecommunications Market In China

Since 1980s, the monopoly for the telecommunications industry has brought about various defects, which caused increasingly fierce criticism. A wave of worldwide reform surged to break the monopoly of, introduce competition into, and slacken the control over the telecom market. To achieve workable competition thus became the main objective of the telecommunications reform. Chinese government started the reform in the telecommunications industry through breaking monopoly and introducing competition since the early 1990s. Through the measures of introducing competition, splitting monopoly vertically and horizontal, and restructuring market, so far there formed a market structure of oligarchy competition with three full-service carriers of the relative close strength. There were heated debates on the purpose and necessity of reform and reflections on the effect and influence throughout the process of every reform.This paper makes a study on current theories of workable competition, especially those in telecommunications market, and finds that there are still inadequacies in the recent study on the workable competition in telecommunications market:first, the biggest problem is that an inadequate understanding of the essence of concept Workable Competition can not lead to explicit criteria, thus can not come to a convincing evaluation about whether Workable Competition was realized in previous reforms; second, the criteria for Workable Competition is mostly analyzed from the perspective of the economic benefits of telecom operators, thus customers are ignored; third, people gave qualitative discussions on whether Workable Competition was realized in previous reforms. Therefore a lack of quantities criteria brought about little empirical study on the extent to which Workable Competition was realized in telecom market.Therefore, this paper is dedicated to making a study on the essence, ideal state and criteria of Workable Competition Theory, and researching the efficiency of previous reforms of telecom market according to the inherent features of telecom market, and put forward some valuable proposals as a reference.This paper comes to a conclusion that:the essence of Workable Competition is the improvement of social welfare; as for telecom market, the ideal state of Workable Competition is that the operators in oligarchy competition reach best economic scale and take equal market shares. The empirical study comes to a conclusion that introducing China Unicom and splitting China Telecom in the telecom market improve social welfare, enhance enterprise scale and economic level, and realize Workable Competition in telecom market to some extent.The first chapter is a preface, which elaborated the background, purpose, significance and major achievement of this study.The second chapter makes a deep research on Workable Competition Theory, including the background, concepts, criteria and evolvement of Workable Competition Theory. This paper gives full meditation on The Workable Competition Theory, elaborated the objective of Workable Competition, suggests that Workable Competition should take the improvement of social welfare as its objective, puts forward criteria for it, and definite the main variables of Workable Competition and their influence on achieving Workable Competition.The third chapter studies the telecommunications market's reform practice to achieve workable competition. The reforms mainly include the telecommunications market's reform practice both at home and abroad that aim to achieve workable competition, the economic and technical features in telecom industry. The third chapter mainly analyzes the nature, objectives and the ideal state of telecom market's workable competition.Chapter four mainly studies the effects of previous reforms of China's telecommunications market on achieving telecommunications market's workable competition. This chapter mainly studies the qualitative analysis and evaluation of China's telecommunications market's reform process, the model and empirical data analysis on marketing achievement of workable competition after the introduction of China Unicom, and the model and empirical data analysis on marketing achievement of workable competition after the vertically and horizontally split on the former China telecom and after telecommunications carriers'reorganization into three full-service operators.Chapter five studies the problem of interconnection, which refers to repeating construction appears in the process of achieving workable competition by the introduction of competition. The most important policy to achieve interconnection is policy of Unbinding Network Elements. Through modeling and qualitative discussion, this paper puts forward some valuable policy recommendations.Chapter six is the summary of main achievements and shortcomings in the study process of this paper and the recommendations for further research.