The measurement of the independence of telecommunications regulatory agencies in Latin America and the Caribbean

In this paper, we apply several alternative methods previously used in the literature to measure the degree of regulatory independence for telecommunications regulators. These alternative methods are applied to a new homogeneous data set for 23 Latin American countries over a 15-year period. We provide a metric to quantify the degree to which each country creates legally independent regulatory agencies in telecommunications. All the methods used provide similar results. When the indices are used in econometric equations for fixed line penetration rates, higher levels of de jure regulatory independence appear to have a positive impact on network penetration.