Governments around the world provide public funding for healthcare to address the failures that arise when healthcare markets are left to their own devices. However, public funding alone, does not incentivise high quality efficient healthcare. Most OECD countries have therefore moved away from...

Industrial policy describes the set of interventions that governments use to affect the economic structure of the economy. Its success or failure therefore has a huge impact on the extent to which a country can achieve inclusive growth. Individual industrial policies can broadly be considered to...

Some policies drive economic growth, some act to redistribute income or wealth; however, it is rare to find policy instruments that do both. Investment in improving skills and education may fall into that category. New research from the OECD suggests that competition can also help governments to...

In recent years the scope for near perfect price discrimination, particularly in the digital economy, appears to have grown. This raises a question over how those jurisdictions in which exploitative price discrimination is an offence will respond. In contrast, the risk of price discrimination...

In advance of the OECD Competition Committee roundtable discussion on 30 November 2016, this blog looks at the concerns and the opportunities created by the increased scope for personalised pricing in the digital economy

In recent years there have been important cases in different jurisdictions that have contributed to a rich debate on the approach to adopt when examining fidelity rebates (sometimes referred to as loyalty discounts). This background paper is intended to draw practical lessons from that debate....

Recent economic research has shown that fixed-price quality competition in the NHS in England is benefiting patients and taxpayers. This research has focused primarily on important outcomes of competition, for example the number of lives saved. In this paper we focus on the mechanism of...

We analyse the relationship between the quality of a GP practice in England and the degree of competition that it faces (as indicated by the number of nearby rival GP practices). We find that those GP practices that are located close to other rival GP practices provide a higher quality of care...

This paper discusses the concept of potential competition as an important pro-competitive factor. While potential competition is inevitably subject to significant uncertainty, where it does exist, the paper suggests treating potential competition with a parity of esteem with respect to actual...

This paper attempts to reconcile the goals of competition and equality within antitrust, and in doing so, suggests that this task can be seen to correspond to the efforts that John Rawls made to reconcile liberalism and equality within his principles of justice. Applying a Rawlsian analysis to...