INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION NETWORK COMPETITION POLICY IMPLEMENTATION WORKING GROUP SUBGROUP ON TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION NETWORK

COMPETITION POLICY IMPLEMENTATION WORKING GROUP

SUBGROUP ON TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE

PROPOSED WORK PLAN 2006-2007

Mission: Subgroup 1 seeks to improve the effectiveness of technical assistance to support an agency’s advocacy and enforcement action.

Background

During the year culminating with the 2003 Annual Conference in Merida, this group, which was then known as the Working Group on Capacity Building and Competition Policy Implementation and led by the European Commission and South Africa, conducted a written questionnaire of providers and recipients of technical assistance and contributed to the preparation of the report entitled “Capacity Building and Technical Assistance: Building Credible Competition Authorities in Developing and Transition Economies.” The report identified a number of cogent areas for further exploration on the technical assistance front.

The Subgroup took its present form after the Merida Annual Conference. During the period leading up to the 2004 Annual Conference in Seoul and the 2005 Annual Conference in Bonn, it designed and conducted a detailed survey of technical assistance recipients to determine with more precision what type of technical assistance works well and what does not. At the Bonn Conference, the Subgroup prepared a report entitled “Assessing Technical Assistance: Examining the Foundations of Successful Assistance.” The report verified the view of previous qualitative research that the satisfaction with technical assistance programs is higher if the recipient agency is actively involved in the initial process of assessing needs for assistance and in the design of specific assistance projects and further found that advisor quality is important for the success of a technical assistance project, and was significantly related to both overall project quality and overall impact on agency effectiveness, that developing competition agencies perceive that advisors are more effective when they are drawn from the ranks of more experienced competition agency staff than from other sources, and that respondents’ satisfaction with a technical assistance project does not necessarily depend on the project’s impact on agency performance. The survey raises many issues for further examination and analysis, however.

Following the Annual Conference in Bonn, the Subgroup’s activities were directed in two directions. First, the subgroup conducted additional surveys and recruited teams of Non-Government Advisors to analyze the results and prepare papers for presentation at the Annual Conference in Cape Town. Accordingly, two papers were presented, one by Prof. Simon Evenett of the University of St. Gallen entitled “The Effectiveness of Technical Assistance, Socio-Economic Development, and the Absorptive Capacity of Competition Agencies,” and the other by Profs. Daniel Sokol and Kyle Stiegert of the University of Wisconsin and Dr. Michael Nicholson of the IRIS Center at the University of Maryland entitled “Assessing the Efficiency of Antitrust/Competition Policy Technical Assistance Programs.”

The second direction, which was not anticipated in the previous work plan, arose from the presentation on the needs of newer competition agencies at the Annual Conference in Bonn. Several members of that panel suggested that the ICN could be helpful to newer competition agencies if it could find a way to make the experience of more experienced competition agencies available to newer competition agencies. At the request of the Steering Group, the Subgroup undertook to design and implement a pilot program that would accomplish this. Under the pilot program, the Subgroup simultaneously explored two basic models for sharing experience with newer agencies: a partnership model, and a consultation model.

The partnership model paired more experienced agencies with less experienced ones. Four pairs of experienced and newer agencies agreed to establish regular contacts and to facilitate inquiries between each other. Each pair worked together to establish a scope of assistance and avenues of communication that worked best for them. Under the consultation model, several ICN members volunteered to participate by making themselves available, within limits they define, to consult with less experienced agencies. Each agency drafted a short synopsis of the type of assistance it could offer. The ICN web site, at http://www.internationalcompetitionnetwork.org/cpi/ConsultIndex.htm, indexes these summaries by particular subject areas that might be subjects of consultation. Any competition agency could choose to contact any participating consulting agency. Each participating consulting agency designated a point of contact that routed all requests to an appropriate expert within the agency and established a direct contact between the staffs of the two agencies. All consultation was on a confidential basis consistent with the jurisdiction's confidentiality rules. Under both models, the program sought to facilitate informal both on the agency-to-agency and individual-to-individual levels. An evaluation of the program was conducted and presented in preliminary form in Cape Town. The evaluation concluded, among other things, that there was widespread support for continuation of the program but that it had not been well publicized or used as intensively as was expected.

Approach:

For the coming year, the Subgroup will build upon its previous work. The Subgroup has identified two priority areas for continued work, as well as one area in which it will maintain its existing work product.

1. The Subgroup will expand the partnership/consultation program to include additional participants and continue to oversee its operation for the coming year. The Subgroup will devote special attention to ensuring that the program is adequately publicized to newer competition agencies. The Subgroup will further review the program in advance of the Moscow Annual Conference and make a recommendation on whether the program should be made permanent.

2. The work on the survey conducted by the Subgroup and released at the Bonn and Cape Town Annual Conferences has contained a wealth of valuable information about what makes technical assistance most effective, as did the report released in Merida and other writings on technical assistance. Because of the wealth of detail, however, much of this work may be difficult for developing competition agencies to digest and utilize. The Subgroup will create a short and cogent document presenting the Subgroup’s significant findings, learning, and observations in a way that can be easily used by developing agencies, donors, and providers of technical assistance. During the course of creating the document, the Subgroup will consider how it should be presented in order to make it most useful to agencies, donors, and providers.

3. The Subgroup will continue to maintain its inventory of technical assistance projects and technical assistance donor contact lists.

Organization: The Subgroup is chaired by Russell Damtoft of the United States Federal Trade Commission and Aini Proos of the Estonian Competition Board.

Subgroup Members

Armenia

Barbados

Brazil SDE

Brazil CADE

Bulgaria

Canada

Croatia

El Salvador

Estonia

European Commission

France DGCCRF

Hungary

Indonesia

Jamaica

Japan

Korea

Mongolia

Pakistan

Panama

Peru

Romania

Slovenia

South Africa Tribunal

South Africa Competition Commission

United States DOJ

United States FTC