Technical Assistance for Law & Economics : An Empirical Analysis in Antitrust/Competition Policy

In the past 15 years, the world has witnessed the large scale introduction of antitrust/competition policy as an instrument of market-facilitating government policy. Building the capacity of young antitrust institutions in the developing world and in transition economies is a means to improving the capacity of these agencies to police against anti-competitive conduct. Many countries have augmented their development of competition agencies with technical assistance (TA) support. Determining how best to design TA programs to interact with nascent and financially constrained competition agencies is a difficult and complex matter. The objective of this study is to assess the impacts of the TA-agency partnership. This chapter focuses specifically on factors that lead to improved effectiveness of TA. In a field that has been lacking for empirical evaluation, we use a unique dataset of responses from 38 competition agencies that have received technical assistance from the period 1996-2003. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that issues of timing and absorptive capacity of particular forms of technical assistance within a larger political economy consideration maximize the impact and effectiveness of technical assistance provided to competition agencies