Competition policy trends and economic growth: cross-national empirical evidence

In: Discussion Papers / Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Forschungsschwerpunkt Märkte und Politik, Abteilung Wettbewerb und Innovation, Band 2009-16

Abstract

"Motivated by the general lack of empirical scholarship concerning the crossnational environment for competition policy, I present measures here of the overall resources dedicated to competition policy and the merger policy workload for thirty-two antitrust jurisdictions over the 1992-2007 period. The data allow analysing a number of perceived trends in competition policy over the last two decades, and allow the generation of some factual insights concerning these trends: e.g., the budgetary commitment to competition policy in the crossnational environment for antitrust has substantially increased over this period; budgetary increases appear to be commensurate with increased antitrust workloads; yet, the role of economics does not appear to have substantially increased relative to the role of law. Moreover, I am also able to provide some evidence that budgetary commitments to antitrust institutions yield economic benefits in terms of improved economic growth: i.e., higher budgetary commitments to competition policy are associated with higher levels per-capita GDP growth." (author's abstract)