Competition
The Competition Committee
The Competition Committee (CC) is a critical forum for advancing U.S. interests in an open, market-based world economy free of intrusive state intervention.
The Competition Committee provides a forum for ensuring that countries maintain their commitment to competitive markets, and allows the United States to advocate throughout the OECD a competition-centered approach that emphasizes deregulation, liberalization, and privatization in regulated sectors, with enforcement centered on consumer welfare and sound economic principles.
Competition Committee discussions over time have resulted in an evolutionary convergence of antitrust enforcement and policy, creating a better environment for expansion of U.S. business abroad and reducing the possibility of conflict in this area.
Projects and Successes
The Competition Committee attracts high-level participation of national experts and has the highest number of requests for participation by non-member states of any OECD committee. Until recently, the committee was the only international forum for in-depth discussion of technical antitrust matters and overall competition policy issues.
The International Competition Network (ICN), a U.S. initiative launched in 2001, brings together a "virtual network" of antitrust officials from around the globe to focus on the nuts and bolts of antitrust enforcement matters, but does not address the sectoral and trade-related issues covered in the Competition Committee and its subsidiary bodies.
Over the years the Competition Committee has produced a number of useful studies (e.g. merger control procedures, exceptions to antitrust law coverage, and the impact of hard core cartels), and non-binding recommendations (e.g., on cooperation and hard core cartels) that have advanced U.S. Government interests. In late 2009, the OECD approved the Competition Assessment Recommendation calling on member states to review their regulatory frameworks to determine if they are unduly restrictive on competition.
The Competition Committee continues to promote the central policy goals of the U.S. antitrust agencies: moving towards policy convergence in antitrust and regulatory policy, identifying best practices in antitrust enforcement, and promoting enforcement cooperation among antitrust agencies. No other international organization fulfills this need, and the United States has been very successful in leading the fight in coordinating a global response to hard-core cartels.