ABSTRACT
This paper questions the ability of mainstream economics to have anything coherent to say about economic development and hence to question whether the deregulation of the telecommunication industry in the mid-80s had any significant effect on that industry's improved performance. Given there is a total lack of relationship between neoclassical production theory and technological change, it is suggested there is no way of knowing whether market liberalisation had any significant impact in the US, UK or Japan, that was independent of the systemic technological transformation in those countries' telecommunication industries. It is therefore concluded that any policy prescriptions proposed for an industry, such as telecommunications, which is undergoing significant technological change, need to be related to the pattern of transformation actually taking place and not to relationships assumed to exist between the market and that industry's performance.
