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The telecommunication industry has experienced significant growth and consolidation in the last decade. The desire of large, multinational customers to obtain fully-integrated, end-to-end global telecommunications services from a single source pushed telecom firms to offer multiservice broadband and seamless worldwide telecommunications networks. However, a major barrier to achieving this goal is the significant capital required to construct and deploy a global network. To overcome these constraints, telecom companies typically adopt approaches like--mergers and acquisitions (M&A), joint ventures, legal partnerships and strategic alliances. As the marketplace continues to grow globally, convergence among major enforcement authorities on fundamental competition principles, such as the role of efficiencies, will be critical. The treatment of efficiencies is however controversial and poses many questions. This research paper explores some of the efficiencies-based motivations and rationales for Telecom M&A. It reviews the procedures and regulatory authorities responsible for telecom merger review in the U.S., Europe and Canada. It also examines the treatment of efficiencies in the context of merger review in three jurisdictions and finally it discusses some of the outstanding policy issues related to treatment of efficiencies.

The strongest empirical evidence of dependency has been the finding of an increasingly negative effect of extensive foreign capital penetration on the subsequent economic growth of the host. This long-run structural effect of foreign direct investment is based on cross-national comparisons over the period 1960-75, with samples of up to ninety-one countries. To date, the structural effect has not been replicated for rich (core) country samples. We suggest that the failure of researchers to substantiate the dependency effects in the core hinges on two problems: I) the need to identify "mature economic dependency" as a variation in the structure of core economic development, and 2; the need to model mature dependency with longitudinal rather than cross-national research designs. In this paper, we use time series data to illustrate the long-term negative effects of Amen can direct investment on post-World War!! economic growth in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]