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, I present measures here of the overall resources dedicated to competition policy and the merger policy work-load for thirty-two antitrust jurisdictions over the 1992-2007 period. The data allow a number of perceived trends in competition policy over the last two decades to be analysed, 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, and yet, the role of economics does not appear to have substantially increased relative to the role of law. Moreover, I am also able to provide some evidence that budgetary commitments to antitrust institutions yield economic benefits in terms of improved economic growth: i.e. higher budgetary commitments to competition policy are associated with higher levels per-capita GDP growth.