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Assessing Competition Policy Performance Metrics: Concerns About Cross-Country Generalisability, Lesley Denardis, A. E. Rodriguez

Political Science & Global Affairs Faculty Publications

Recent interest in competition policy performance has typically relied on subjective performance metrics that have undergone little direct scrutiny by users. We examine the quality of the popular World Economic Forum's antitrust performance metric and assess whether it is immune from perception-bias. A bias-free metric is required to ensure cross-country consistency in its intended performance assessment.

We note various instances where the WEF's competition policy performance survey was completed but where there existed neither competition legislation nor an associated enforcement agency at the time. This seeming inconsistency is neither amenable to traditional econometric heterogeneity treatment nor instrumentable; importantly, it is …

Examining The Performance Of Competition Policy Enforcement Agencies: A Cross-Country Comparison, A. E. Rodriguez, Lesley A. Denardis

Political Science & Global Affairs Faculty Publications

An examination of a cross-section of 102 nations reveals marked differences in the performance of their competition policy enforcement agencies. Likely explanatory factors considered include gross domestic product per capita, the intensity of competition, physical size, the level of corruption, national experience with a modern antitrust law and whether the common law prevails. Competition policy agencies operate poorly in jurisdictions characterized by corruption and poor competitive intensity. In fact, differences in levels of corruption and variations in the intensity of competition account for approximately 78 percent of the observed variance in agency performance. Group characteristics, however, vary by region and …