Competition Reforms in Key Markets for Enhancing Social & Economic Welfare in Developing Countries’ (CREW Project)

CUTS International is implementing a project entitled ‘Competition Reforms in Key Markets for Enhancing Social & Economic Welfare in Developing Countries’ (CREW Project), in four countries: Ghana, India, The Philippines and Zambia and across two common sectors: i) Staple Food and ii) Passenger Transport, with the support from DFID (United Kingdom) and BMZ (Germany) facilitated by GIZ (Germany). The project would be implemented from November 2012 over a period of three years.

The process of competition enforcement is fairly weak across many developing countries, and needs to be strengthened to ensure that competition reforms lead to measurable and demonstrable welfare gains. Developing and least developed countries are faced with resource constraints, and policymakers need to make difficult choices/decisions while allocating scarce resources between various public policy areas. For resources to be made available to implement competition reforms in developing countries, it is necessary that impacts of competitive markets on consumers and producers are properly demonstrated and explained to policymakers (and development partners as well). However, there is lack of comprehensive approaches for measuring such benefits.

Through this project CUTS aims to develop an approach, which would help in assessing benefits of competition reforms on consumers and producers in select two sectors. One of the main goals of this project is to demonstrate the benefits of competition reforms for consumers and producers, so that greater attention and support can be provided to this issue by policymakers based in developing countries.