Increasing Competition in Latin America and the Caribbean

Increasing Competition in Latin America and the Caribbean

Enrique Iglesias Auditorium

Room CR-2

March 2, 2006

10:-30- 10: 40 am

Competition and Business Climate

Antonio Vives, Manager a.i. Sustainable Development Department

Increased competition can promote better economic performance, open business opportunities to citizens and reduce costs of goods and services. The seminar will begin with an overview connecting competition to superior economic performance.

10:40- 11:40 am

The Relationship between Competition and Growth: Why and How to Increase Competition. The OECD Toolkit and Resources

Sean Ennis -Senior Economist in the Competition Division of the OECD

Joe Phillips - Head of the Competition Division of the OECD.

Better and effective competition is related economic performance and therefore National competition authorities play two key roles in an economy. First, they prosecute unlawful private restraints of competition, like cartel agreements, abuse of dominance and anti-competitive mergers. Second, they advocate for pro-competitive reform of laws and regulations.

However, numerous laws and regulations restrict competition in the marketplace. Many go further than necessary to achieve their policy objectives.

Governments can reduce unnecessary restrictions by applying the OECD's new “Competition Assessment Toolkit”, which provides a general methodology for identifying such restraints and developing alternative less restrictive policies that still achieve government objectives. The materials can be used by governments in a variety of ways, e.g., when reviewing draft legislation or regulations or, more ambitiously, when reviewing existing laws and regulations. A number of countries have already committed to use the toolkit approach on a trial basis.

The toolkit materials are simple enough for use by officials with no specialized economics or competition policy training. Institutionally, potential users could include ministries, legislatures, and offices of government leaders, sub-federal levels of government and outside evaluators of policy. The Competition Assessment Toolkit is available in Spanish, Portuguese, French and English.

11:40 - 12-20 pm

The Effectiveness of Technical Assistance to Emerging Countries to address anti-Competitive Behavior

D. Daniel Sokol, William H. Hastie Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Law School and Kyle W. Stiegert, School of Agriculture

at the University of Wisconsin

Effective antitrust is essential to prevent monopolies and cartels from dominating economies and undermining growth and development. Building the capacity of young antitrust institutions in the developing world and in transition economies is a means to improving the capabilities of these agencies to police against anticompetitive conduct. To facilitate the new regulatory order and to constrain retrenchment of these policies, countries increasingly have looked to the implementation/enforcement of antitrust policies through competition agencies. Many nations have augmented their development of competition agencies with technical assistance (TA) support. Determining how best to design TA programs to interact with nascent and financially constrained competition agencies is a difficult and complex matter. The objective of this study is to assess the impacts of the TA-agency partnership. The presentation will focus on a paper specifically analyzing factors that lead to improved effectiveness of TA as it pertains to improved agency effectiveness. In a field that has been lacking for empirical evaluation, a unique dataset of responses from 38 competition agencies that have received technical assistance from the period 1996-2003 is used. The empirical analysis demonstrates that issues of timing and absorptive capacity of particular forms of technical assistance within a larger political economy consideration maximize the impact and effectiveness of technical assistance provided to competition agencies.

12:20 p.m.- 12:50 p.m.

Competition and in Latin American and the Caribbean: The Experience of the IDB

IDB (TBD)

12:50 p.m. -1:00 p.m.

Closing remarks

1:00 p.m.-2:00 p.m.

Light lunch provided

Short Bios

Sean Ennis is a Senior Economist in the Competition Division of the OECD where he leads the OECD's competition assessment project, is responsible for work on competition and regulation and has run technical assistance activities related to competition law and policy in Southeast Europe. He earned a BA Hons in economics from King's College, Cambridge and PhD in economics from UC Berkeley. He worked previously at the US Department of Justice's Antitrust Division and at the European Commission's DG Competition.He has publishedresearch on competition policy and has written8 OECD papersaddressing competition policy in regulatedsectors.

Joe Phillips is Head of the Competition Division of the OECD.He is responsible fora growing program of support for the competition authorities of OECD member countries and, since 1990, a programof technical assistance in competition law and policyfor developing and transition countries,including regional training centers in Seoul and Budapest. Until the mid-1990s, he was also responsible for theOECD's Consumer Policy Committee. From 1974 to 1985, he held various positions in the United States Federal Trade Commission. He earned a BA in Economics from the University of Michigan and a JD fromStanfordUniversity. He is a member of the Bars of California and District of Columbia.

D. Daniel Sokol is a William H. Hastie Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Law School. He holds a BA from AmherstCollege, MSt. From the University of Oxford and a JD from the University of Chicago. He is editing a book on Latin American antitrust. Sokol serves as one of the editors of the Antitrust Law and Competition Policy Prof Blog (

Kyle W. Stiegert is the Director of the Food System Research Group in the Agriculture and Applied Economics department in the School of Agriculture at the University of Wisconsin. He holds a B.S. and MS from the University of Nebraska and a PhD from PurdueUniversity. Stiegert is co-editing a book on international food retailing. He has provided classroom instruction to competition authorities in Armenia.

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