The Necessary Conditions for Evolving Competition Authorities in Transition and Developing Countries to succeed

The purpose of the research is to identify some of the key ingredients that stand as obstacles on the way of the evolving competition authorities in transition and developing worlds to become truly independent and efficient in accomplishing their mission.

Many transition and developing countries have now adopted competition laws. These laws are generally sufficient, most often modelled on EU Articles 81 and 82. There are however few nuances, in particular related to the powers of competition authorities, that indicate the environment that the competition authorities operate, in particular making it more difficult finding out and prosecuting cartel cases. The existence of more enabling clauses in the laws often points to better competition climate.

In a vast majority of cases in transition and developing countries, competition laws do not adequately translate into effective implementation policies. We should analyse the enforcement practices of the same set of countries and follow the relationship between strength of laws and strength of enforcement practices. We should analyse anticorruption climate in these selected countries using different rankings (e.g. Corruption Perception Index by Transparency International, ranking by the WB/IFC in their “Doing business” surveys, and so on).

Overall the analysis will focus on the period 1994-2004. I intend to draw the links between the factors identified above, i.e.: strength of competition laws- strength of competition enforcement practices- anticorruption/enabling environment.

The main hypothesis of the paper to examine is that the (lack of) strength of competition laws and the (low) speed of its positive changes are directly linked to the strength of competition policy implementation practices and linked to the (anti) corruption climates in the countries