Senior Researcher, Onkokame Mothobi, makes use of the RIA African Mobile Pricing Indices to investigate the effect of telecommunication regulatory policies on Mobile Retail Prices. The paper “The Impact of Telecommunication Regulatory Policy on Mobile Retail Price in Sub-Sharan African Countries” uses quarterly data for 8 African countries for the period 2010:Q4 to 2014:Q4 to estimate structural demand and supply equations. It is being presented at the De Montfort University (Leicester) seminar series 22 March 2017 at 1300hrs (GMT).
The author found 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
