Privatization, Liberalization of the Greek Telecommunication Sectors: a Social Cost – Benefit Analysis

With pressure from IMF and lately from the EU, privatization has become the key dimension of the world capital markets over the past three decades, and European Union has been the international leader in selling state-owned productive assets (national wealth) to the private sector (mostly to foreign firms) (Kallianiotis, 2007). The Greek Telecommunication industry as part of EU Telecommunication sector has experienced enormous changes in this period too. In this paper we have obtained the main economic indicators of the Greek Telecommunications industry, and report a social cost -benefit analysis of the privatization and liberalization of the Greek Telecommunications sector from 1998 up to 2009. Our results show that the net social benefits range from 62.85% to 145% of OTE‘s total annual revenues in 1998. This is a result well between the efficiency gains range obtained by Galal (Galal, et al., 1994). We can conclude that all agents seem to have benefited from the OTE privatization and the liberalization of the Greek telecommunications market