New Frontiers for Competition Advocacy and the Potential Role of Competition Impact Assessment
Forthcoming in: F. Di Porto and J. Drexel (eds), Competition Law as Regulation?, Edward Elgar: Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, 2014
40 Pages Posted: 15 Mar 2014
Date Written: March 13, 2014
Abstract
This Chapter will explore the question of how best to increase the effectiveness of advocacy activities in order to improve competition friendly regulation.
In this framework, three tools are compared: the use of competition concepts in rule-making, i.e. hybridisation, traditional advocacy interventions, competition impact assessment. The analysis is intended to highlight the key components of these tools, to assess their effectiveness in improving regulation and sound competition, and to suggest appropriate uses for each.
Then, a more in-depth analysis is dedicated to the role that ex ante and ex post competition impact assessment can play in order to improve good quality regulation (and in so doing enhance competition), and the crucial part that competition authorities might play in this.
This Chapter concludes that competition impact assessment might be considered a new advocacy tool and the most effective among them (being used at a very early stage, using economic analysis and always taking into consideration the option not to intervene through regulation), provided that the analysis is limited to rules which have been correctly selected according to the proportionality principle and that is not used in a ritualistic way. It also underlines that the involvement of competition authorities might increase the effectiveness of competition assessment (by enhancing the robustness of the economic analysis and therefore addressing the above-mentioned ritualistic approach), even though some issues remain unsolved, one of the most important being how best to balance the role of regulators and competition authorities.
Keywords: competition, regulation, competition assessment, regulatory impact assessment, competition advocacy
JEL Classification: K21, K23, L40, L50
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation