International Economics Commons^™

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 …