This book constitutes a collaborative and selected documentation of the scientific outcome of the European COST Action IS0605 Econ@Tel "A Telecommunications Economics COST Network" which run from October 2007 to October 2011. Involving experts from around 20 European countries, the goal of Econ@Tel was to develop a strategic research and training network among key people and organizations in order to enhance Europe's competence in the field of telecommunications economics. Reflecting the organization of the COST Action IS0605 Econ@Tel in working groups the following four major research areas are addressed: - evolution and regulation of communication ecosystems; - social and policy implications of communication technologies; - economics and governance of future networks; - future networks management architectures and mechanisms.

Strategies linking the dynamic and changing world of telecommunication to local desires for economic growth are at the heart of this important book. In the age of information, grass roots political leaders have discovered telecommunications as they seek to boost local employment and community well-being. Taking the cases of Richardson, Texas, a Dallas suburb that has attracted over 50,000 high-tech jobs, city-state Singapore, which has successfully upgraded its telecommunications infrastructure to lure information-intensive companies, Atlanta, using the 1996 Olympics to advance its information-technology base, and others, the authors critically examine the successes and failures of each. Their conclusions will be invaluable to planners, politicians, and scholars who want to know whether and how advanced telecommunications infrastructure leads to accelerated economic development.

Telecommunications are increasingly recognized as a key component in the infrastructure of economic development. For many years, there were state-owned monopolies in the telecommunications sector. In transition economies, they were characterized by especially poor performance and high access deficits, as telecommunications were considered to be a non-profit-oriented production process intended to support the socio-economic superstructures. As a result, the starting point for the reform processes in transition countries was quite poor performed public monopolies, functioned under completely different circumstances as the peers in the market economies. The main question of this book is what the strategies for the successful future development of the telecommunications sector in transition countries are. The special focus is on Russia, the largest of the transition countries.

The world economy has experienced an enormous growth the past 50 years. Yet the gap between the richest and the poorest countries has increased. There have been several attempts to explain the increased differences. Proponents of the endogenous growth theory claim that a technological revolution has created a new growth paradigm. Following the information technology revolution seen in the industrialised world in the 90s, information and communication technology has often been launched as a possible remedy for the slow or decelerating growth developing countries have faced. This paper seeks to explore the relationship between telecommunications development and economic growth by performing an econometrical analysis of 61 developing countries and 23 developed countries between 1990 and 1999. By estimating a simultaneous equation model where telecommunication infrastructure investments are endogenised into the aggregated economy and country specific fixed effects are included, simultaneous causality and spurious correlation are recognised. The results of the analysis indicate that there is a significant correlation between telecommunication and GDP growth. Overall, there seems to be larger growth effects from telecommunication development in developing countries than in developed countries, a result that contradicts earlier findings and the notion of network externalities. The report suggests that the indirect effects, i.e. the gain in productivity that other sectors experience as a result of development in the telecommunication sector, are more significant in developing countries, and this might explain the large growth effects found in these countries.