Measuring the deterrence properties of competition policy: the competition policy indexes

This article describes in detail a set of newly developed indicators of the quality of competition policy, the Competition Policy Indexes (CPIs). The CPIs measure the deterrence properties of a jurisdiction’s competition policy—where by competition policy, we mean the antitrust legislation including the merger control provisions and its enforcement. The CPIs incorporate data on how the key features of a competition policy regime (particularly information on the legal framework, the institutional settings, and the enforcement tools of each jurisdiction that we examine) score against a benchmark of generally agreed-upon best practices and summarize them, so as to allow cross-country and cross-time comparisons. We calculate the CPIs for a sample of 13 OECD jurisdictions over the period from 1995 to 2005.

Forthcoming in the Journal of Competition Law & Economics (working version downloadable)