Inter-American Development Bank/OECD Workshop: Increasing Competition in Latin America and the Caribbean

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

With over 100 plus antitrust regimes around the world and most fewer than 15 years old, issues of institutional capacity are at the forefront of effective antitrust enforcement. Scholarship to date has only begun to scratch the surface as to determining the most effective strategies to utilize scarce resources for antitrust. An upcoming conference co-sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank’s Infrastructure and Financial Markets Division of the Private Enterprise and Financial Markets Subdepartment and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) will provide an opportunity to reflect on these issues.

Increasing Competition in Latin America and the Caribbean

Date: Friday, March 2, 2007
Time: 10:30 a.m. - 2:00 p.m.
Place: Inter-American Development Bank
Conference Room CR-200 (Auditorium - Enrique Iglesias)
1300 New York Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20577

Effective competition can promote better economic performance, open business opportunities to citizens and reduce costs of goods and services.  The mini-seminar will provide an overview connecting competition to superior economic performance.  It will then look into more details on the role of competition authorities, regulation and enforcement.  The OECD's new “Competition Assessment Toolkit” will offer a methodology for identifying constraints and developing alternative less restrictive policies that still achieve government objectives.  Academics from the University of Wisconsin will focus on how effective antitrust is essential to prevent monopolies and cartels from dominating economies and undermining growth.

Featured Speakers:

Sean Ennis is a Senior Economist in the Competition Division of the OECD where he leads the OECD's competition assessment project. He is responsible for work on competition and regulation and has run technical assistance activities related to competition law and policy in Southeast Europe.

Joe Phillips is Head of the Competition Division of the OECD. He is responsible for a growing program of support for the competition authorities of OECD member countries and, since 1990, a program of technical assistance in competition law and policy for developing and transition countries, including regional training centers in Seoul and Budapest.

D. Daniel Sokol is a William H. Hastie Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Law School. 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.

For additional information, please contact Liliana López (lilianal@iadb.org).

Papers can be downloaded below:

Agenda  Download agendafebrero_20.doc

Brief for Policy Officials Download oecd_competition_assessment_brief.pdf

Guidance  Download OECD_Competition_Assessment_Guidance.pdf

Institutional Options for Competition Assessment Download oecd_competition_assessment_institutional_options.pdf

Executive Overview: Integrating Competition Assessment into Regulatory Impact Analysis Download oecd_competition_assessment_integrating_into_ria.pdf

Relationship between Competition Policy and Economic Performance Download comp_econ_perf_8_feb_2007.pdf

Technical Assistance for Law and Economics: An Empirical Analysis in Antitrust/Competition Policy