Competition Policy Trends And Economic Growth: Cross-National Empirical Evidence

Motivated by the general lack of empirical scholarship concerning the cross-national environment for competition policy, the author presents measures here of the overall resources dedicated to competition policy and the merger policy workload for thirty-two antitrust jurisdictions over the 1992-2007 period. The data allow analysing a number of perceived trends in competition policy over the last two decades, and allow the generation of some factual insights concerning these trends: e.g., the budgetary commitment to competition policy in the cross-national environment for antitrust has substantially increased over this period; budgetary increases appear to be commensurate with increased antitrust workloads; yet, the role of economics does not appear to have substantially increased relative to the role of law.