Reports

The Competitive Neutrality Toolkit provides a set of good practices, based on examples from international experience, to support public officials in identifying and reducing distortions to competition due to state intervention. It supports the implementation of the principles set out in the OECD Recommendation on Competitive Neutrality to promote a level playing field, and covers the Recommendation’s main themes: competition law and enforcement, regulatory environment, public procurement, state support, and public service obligations.

Data plays an increasingly important role for online platforms and the majority of digital business models. Along with data becoming central to competition and the conduct of actors in digital markets, there has been an increase in data privacy regulations and enforcement worldwide. The interplay between competition and data privacy has prompted questions about whether data privacy and the collection of consumers’ data constitute an antitrust issue. Should competition considerations be factored into decisions by data protection authorities, and, if so, how can synergies between the two policy areas be enhanced and tensions overcome? This paper explores the links between competition and data privacy, their respective objectives, and how considerations pertaining to one policy area have been, or could be, included into the other. It investigates enforcement interventions and regulatory measures that could foster synergies or lead to potential challenges, and offers insights into models for co-operation between competition and data protection authorities. This is a joint working paper from the OECD Competition and Digital Economy Policy Secretariat.

This paper discusses recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI, which could positively impact many markets. While it is important that markets remain competitive to ensure their benefits are widely felt, the lifecycle for generative AI is still developing. This paper focuses on three stages: training foundation models, fine-tuning and deployment. It is too early to say how competition will develop in generative AI, but there appear to be some risks to competition that warrant attention, such as linkages across the generative AI value chain, including from existing markets, and potential barriers to accessing key inputs such as quality data and computing power. Several competition authorities and policy makers are taking actions to monitor market developments and may need to use the various advocacy and enforcement tools at their disposal. Furthermore, co-operation could play an important role in allowing authorities to efficiently maintain their knowledge and expertise.

Recent global developments, and a number of serious crises, have led to large government interventions in many jurisdictions, driving a debate on whether there is a need to rethink the role of industrial policy in modern economies. This paper explores how to use industrial policy and make it pro-competitive. Competition authorities can play a crucial role in strengthening the impact of industrial policy: by ensuring that competition principles remain a cornerstone of carefully designed industrial policy. Moreover, competition enforcement keeps markets more competitive, laying a good foundation for industrial policy.

Competition authorities have already acquired significant knowledge about the concept of market power and dominance as well as practical experience when assessing anticompetitive practices. However, the introduction of potential new concepts, such as economic moats and entrenchment, may complicate this analysis and further blur the lines between lawful and unlawful practices. This paper discusses the relation between economic moats and entrenchment with market power and calls for further reflections among competition authorities and practitioners on the challenges these concepts may pose. It explores several possible options, including incentivising the use of investigative and analytical techniques, as well as strengthening regulatory tools.

The regulation of occupations is widespread, extending beyond the liberal professions, such as lawyers and engineers, to a broader set of other economic activities. Competition authorities have long been active in improving competition in these markets, both through enforcement action and by advocating to make regulation more pro-competitive. This paper aims to support competition authorities’ advocacy efforts. It includes an overview of the literature about the effects of regulation of professional services, which competition authorities can draw on to advocate for the benefits of less restrictive regulation where appropriate. The paper also brings together analytical frameworks developed by the OECD and jurisdictions such as Australia, the US and EU to assess regulatory barriers to competition. The paper further draws on case studies of advocacy efforts from competition authorities across a range of OECD member countries.

The 2024 edition of the OECD Competition Trends report highlights worldwide competition enforcement trends during the calendar year 2022 based on 77 jurisdictions. Similar to previous editions, this year’s report compares different geographic regions and identifies trends over time. Analyses focus on competition authorities’ resources and their enforcement activity in cartels, abuse of dominance cases, mergers, and advocacy activity. Moreover, this year’s edition includes a special chapter on merger control, which provides for the first time a disaggregate analysis of the participating jurisdictions. It also contains an analysis of all merger prohibition cases between 2015 and 2022.

This report builds on the recommendations of the 2022 OECD Peer Review of Competition Law and Policy in Tunisia. It presents an overview of how to develop competition law guidelines across four areas (merger control, pecuniary penalties, leniency programmes and compliance programmes) and includes a comparative analysis of selected jurisdictions, with the view of assisting Tunisian authorities to develop their own guidelines. While competition guidelines can play an important role in fostering competition policy in Tunisia, it should go hand in hand with addressing specific shortcomings in the enforcement and advocacy framework as identified in the Peer Review.

Peer reviews of competition law and policy are a valuable tool to reform and strengthen a country’s competition framework. This peer review of the Dominican Republic presents the evolution of its competition regime over the last few years and assesses the effectiveness of its current competition law and policy. It provides recommendations to help the Dominican Republic strengthen its competition regime and institutions, developed and discussed at the Peer Review examination carried out during the 2023 OECD-IDB Latin American and Caribbean Competition Forum.

This market study provides an assessment of competition in three broad areas of the retail banking sector in Tunisia: current accounts, bank loans for micro, small and medium enterprises and mobile payment services. The report identifies areas where competition is not working as well as it could, reducing customers mobility and access to finance and limiting the competitive pressure that fintech companies can exert on traditional banks. The report provides a range of recommendations to improve market outcomes for financial services users and it includes estimates of the expected impact of the implementation of the recommendations on the economy. This competition market study is part of a broader project aiming at fostering pro-competitive reforms in Tunisia.