Competition

Competitive and fair markets bring consumers higher quality goods and services, lower prices, and more choice. As they encourage firms to become more efficient and to enter new markets, they lead to greater efficiency and in turn to economic growth. Competition also provides powerful incentives for businesses to innovate and helps drive technology adoption.

Competition authorities and governments should promote a level playing field for competitors, ensuring that public policies support efficient markets and that the design of industrial strategies goes hand in hand with competition policy. The OECD works with governments to help them achieve important policy objectives, such as promoting sustainability, without creating unnecessary barriers to competition and assess if competition is working well in all sectors, through in-country projects and international standards such as the OECD Competition Assessment toolkit. 

Competition authorities play an essential role in helping governments promote stronger and more productive economies by vigorously enforcing existing legal competition frameworks. By detecting and investigating cartels, sanctioning abuses of dominance and blocking anti-competitive mergers, governments ensure the correct functioning of markets.

The OECD works closely with competition authorities throughout the world, to set standards to ensure the delivery of effective competition law enforcement. These include recommendations, guidelines and regular roundtables exchanging best practices on key topics in areas such as digital markets, innovation, co-operation and competitive neutrality which are at the forefront of the global competition agenda.

Globalisation and the digital economy have increased the number of competition policy issues and international enforcement cases. This includes issues such as cross-border mergers or potential anticompetitive behaviour by digital platforms. Co-operation between jurisdictions is crucial to promote the economic and welfare goals of sound competition policy at both a national and global level. It also fosters trust and transparency between jurisdictions and facilitates effective international business compliance.

The OECD promotes international co-operation through a variety roundtable discussions, recommendations and reports, through networks, such as the regional centres for competition, and with global events. 

Digitalisation has reshaped competitive dynamics in the economy, creating new markets and transforming existing ones. This presents a multifaceted challenge for competition authorities and policymakers. They must grapple with uncertainty in rapidly evolving markets, address new forms of misconduct, for instance related to the role of ecosystems or platforms’ use of data, and examine markets whose precise boundaries are unclear. At the same time, mounting concerns about conduct in digital markets and indicators of growing market power have led to calls for new competition policy tools and the more active use of existing ones.

The OECD monitors the evolution of competition policy in the digital era while informing the debate through its G7 inventory of new rules for digital markets and its Best Practice Roundtables on Competition Policy.