The Regulatory Reform in the Turkish Telecommunications Industry

In the 1980s, Turkey initiated a liberalization and deregulation movement to introduce competition to its domestic markets and to transform the Turkish economy from an import substituting economy to export-based one. The aim was to institutionalize economic change through transition to the economic institutions of capitalism. However, the traditional institutional structure had resisted the process of institutionalization of economic change until the 2000s. Liberalization did not bring about a relaxation in the traditional and statist institutional environment. In the 1980s, institutional structure was not ready for the transition. In the 1990s, Turkey suffered from the loose political structure with coalition governments and the resistance of traditional bureaucracy and judiciary environments to the transition. As a result, the reform initiatives were not able to lead to the transition to the economic institutions of capitalism based on institutionalization in the political, bureaucratic, and legal spheres. Whereas the legal and bureaucratic institutional structure resisted the change, the political process led to a rent-seeking society (Çetin, 2010). Throughout this period including the 1980s and 1990s, network and infrastructure industries continued to remain heavily monopolies. On the other hand, over the last decade, Turkey has been