Capacity Building for Bulgaria’s Commission on Protection of Competition (EBRD)

Lear is providing technical assistance to the Bulgarian Commission for Protection of Competition (“CPC”) to strengthen the skills and competencies of its officials and case handlers on competition law enforcement. The project aims at building the skills and knowledge necessary for officials and case handlers to perform antitrust and merger investigations in line with best international practice.
To this purpose, the project includes: (i) the delivery of a formal, classroom-based training programme combining a review of main economic and legal concepts in competition law enforcement with the assessment of relevant EU case law; (ii) the provision of a toolkit on ex-post evaluation of merger decisions, in the form of a short manual containing the description of the empirical methodologies and examples of recent studies.

Lear’s team, with the help of external experts, has indeed delivered seven trainings at the CPC premises covering both legal and economic aspects of competition policy and public procurement, and in particular:

1. The basic econometrics theory
2. Micro-economic applications with Stata
3. Abuse of superior bargaining power
4. Ex-post evaluation of the effects of mergers control decisions
5. Sector inquiries and market monitoring
6. Protection of rights in public procurement systems
7. The optimal design of tenders in public procurement