The OECD Global Forum on Competition brings together every year competition officials from over 110 authorities and organisations worldwide.
In 2015, the Forum opened with a session on competition and employment with keynote speeches by Guy Ryder (ILO) and Mario Monti (former Italy's Prime Minister). The Forum also held a peer review of Kazakhstan, a roundtable on disruptive innovation and another one on serial offenders.
This session explored ways in which pro-competitive policies may support the creation of jobs or alternatively, if it is the case that competition destroys jobs. In many economies, emerging as well as developed, it is often the case that opening economic sectors hitherto protected to competition is perceived as threatening existing jobs. In times of an economic downturn, a typical policy response may be retrenchment and the erection of regulatory or political barriers to competition in an effort to preserve jobs. This may be the case in merger reviews where job preserving remedies may be imposed by the enforcer. However, such barriers may in the long term prevent the creation of new jobs. This session explored the nature of this relationship.
“Peer review” is a core element of OECD work. The mechanisms of peer review vary, but it is founded upon the willingness of a country to submit its laws and policies to substantive questioning by other peers. The process provides valuable insights into the country under study, getting to the heart of ways in which each country deals with competition and regulatory issues, from the soundness of its competition laws to the structure and effectiveness of its competition institutions. In 2015 Kazakhstan’s competition law and policy was subject to such a review.
Disruptive innovations raise questions for competition law enforcement, for instance when considering mergers between disruptive innovators and incumbents, or exclusionary conduct by incumbents against innovators. Incumbents not only have an incentive to destroy an innovation by merger or exclusion, but might also inadvertently kill it through acquisition. This session explored the competition law enforcers’ dilemma in merger review, for instance whether to impose behavioural remedies, but the session may also explore issues related to exclusionary conduct.
This full-day discussion on serial offenders explored why some industries seem prone to endemic collusion, focussion on the sectors of chemicals, construction services (including public tenders, cement and concrete) and food products.
Three break-out sessions allowed participants to further exchange on the different sectors.
