The liberalisation of the telecommunications markets in the industrialised countries has generated a great expectation concerning the effects of this policy on firms’ productivity and efficiency. In this paper, following Battese y Coelli (1995), we estimate a stochastic production frontier that allows to analyse jointly the path of the technical efficiency change and the influence on this variation of the market liberalisation, among other relevant variables. The data set used contains information on a sample of thirteen telecommunications firms belonging to OCDE countries, for the period 1990-97. The main results obtained point out that firms operating in regulated (no liberalised) markets are, in general, more inefficient technically than those that belong to markets where the deregulation has been carried out.
 
Keywords: telecommunications, deregulation, efficiency.
Clasificación JEL: C61, D24, L51, L96.