Private investment, entrepreneurial entry, and partner collaboration in emerging markets telecommunications: The impact of country, industry, and firm-level factors

In this dissertation, I investigate factors at the country, industry, and firm level that affect the structure and ownership of private telecommunications infrastructure projects. I draw on theoretical and empirical literature in strategic management, international business, and other areas of economics and managerial research to support the research questions and hypotheses.; I construct a database that incorporates information from the World Bank's private participation in infrastructure (PPI) database and other archival data. This dataset includes information on 553 telecommunications projects in 96 developing countries. Using standard parametric techniques, I test for direct relationships between the main predictor and criterion variables. In addition, qualitative examples and illustrations are included to complement and amplify the quantitative tests.; I find that higher private participation is positively associated with development level, greenfield (new) projects, and joint venture (v. wholly-owned) projects, and negatively associated with higher levels of state ownership of the principal project investor. Greenfield investment projects are more likely to be found in countries with higher “regulatory constraints” and are more likely to include more sophisticated telecommunications technology. Divestitures (privatizations) are more likely to include investors that had higher levels of state ownership by their home governments. Joint ventures are more likely to be found in countries with larger overall economic output, and with greater regulatory constraints.; Investor firm practices and behavior patterns demonstrated a distinctive linkage between home and host country geography, past colonial relationships, and other non-economic connections. In addition, these initial investments set a pattern for subsequent investment activity, resulting in an agglomeration or “bunching” effect that is relatively consistent across investors and regions.; These results support the thesis that host government policy and investor firm characteristics shape the structure and ownership of investment projects. Greater levels of private ownership and control and increased incidence of joint venture projects will result when governments provide legal and regulatory protections to investors. In addition, early investments will yield improved access to subsequent opportunities. This research contributes to literature on private investment in emerging markets and may be informative for future research relating to other infrastructure industries such as power and water that are now undergoing privatization and restructuring.