The Regional Competition Center for Latin America Presents: Regional Database Containing Rulings from National Competition Authorities

The Regional Competition Center for Latin America Presents: Regional Database Containing Rulings from National Competition Authorities – Aitor Ortiz* (CRCLA)

The Regional Competition Center for Latin America (or CRCAL by its acronym in Spanish) continues to foster collaboration and knowledge-sharing among competition agencies in Latin America. CRCAL’s latest initiative seeks to overcome hurdles that prevent some agencies from developing advanced and reliable information technology tools.

For this purpose, the CRCAL, assisted by consultants David Stallibrass and Aitor Ortiz, is committed to design and implement a region-wide platform for sharing agency experience and knowledge about competition law enforcement and furnish agencies with information about markets and industries in the region, and investigative tools, etc. It also is envisaged that the database will eventually include advocacy tools such as opinions, sector studies, guidelines, etc.

Initially, the CRCAL expects to provide a regional database containing the resolutions issued by the competition agencies across Latin America. The database project is divided into three stages: 1) design the criteria to classify the resolutions, 2) undertake pilot testing; and 3) incorporate the existing resolutions from all the participating competition authorities to the back-end database.

The first stage consists of defining the structure or taxonomy of the database. This is probably the most complex