Lear has been appointed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to provide technical assistance to the Armenian Competition Protection Commission (“CPC RA”). The project, funded by the European Union, aims at supporting the institutional development, policy enforcement capacity, and advocacy activities of the CPC RA; it will be a comprehensive capacity building programme based on trainings, advocacy support, market studies, and secondary legislation drafting. The project also envisages the organization of several study visits to other national competition authorities and the participation of SCPEC RA staff members to international events.

Lear is implementing a technical assistance project funded by the EBRD for the Albanian Competition Authority (“ACA”). The project aims at strengthening ACA’s advocacy role in the country as well as the skills and competencies of its officials and case handlers, through the following activities: (1) preparation and promotion of a long-term strategy for “Competition Advocacy and Communication”; Continue reading Capacity Building for the Albanian Competition Authority →

Lear provided technical assistance to the Jamaican Fair Trading Commission, the local competition agency, to increase the effectiveness of competition advocacy in the country. The main milestones of the projects were: to review the international best practices and to assess the effectiveness of the Fair Trading Commission’s advocacy interventions; to propose recommendations and outline appropriate advocacy tools and strategies as well as a well-sequenced Implementation Plan that the Jamaican Fair Trading Commission may implement in order to increase the likelihood that its opinions and other interventions are accepted/implemented; to build capacity within the Jamaican Fair Trading Commission on the relevant competition advocacy tools to support the implementation of the proposed recommendations.

Lear provided technical assistance to the Bulgarian Commission for Protection of Competition to strengthen the skills and competencies of its officials and case handlers on competition law enforcement. The project aimed 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 included: (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, delivered seven trainings at the Bulgarian Commission for Protection of Competition 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 system; 7) optimal design of tenders in public procurement in order to prevent collusion.