This article is part of a Chronicle. See more from this Chronicle
Maria Coppola, Aug 12, 2014
The International Competition Network’s commitment to competition advocacy dates back to the network’s establishment in 2001, when ICN’s founders chose competition advocacy as one of the two areas of focus for the nascent network. Recognizing that public restraints-legislation, regulations, and policies-can have deleterious effects on markets by unnecessarily restricting competition, and that the goal of competition advocacy is to enhance understanding of the competitive process and provide a framework for thinking about public policy issues from a competition perspective, the ICN has dedicated significant resources to developing materials to help competition agencies engage in effective advocacy.
This past year, the ICN broke new ground in adopting recommended practices in the area of competition advocacy when the 127 member agencies approved 13 practices on conducting competition assessments. The first part of this article is devoted to these new recommended practices, followed by a discussion of some of the ICN’s other work in the area of advocacy. The second part, in line with the outreach theme of this CPI Antitrust Chronicle symposium discusses the network’s own tools for promoting outreach to its members and nongovernmental advisors including a short profile of the ICN’s free-of-charge virtual university.
