Conditions of Competition and Multilateral Surveillance

WTO members are starting to consider whether and how to develop multilateral disciplines on competition policies. These discussions are taking place in the absence of concerted efforts to compile comparable information on the conditions of competition existing on member country markets. We argue in this paper that collection of simple measures of industrial structure and import penetration would be useful in characterizing the 'conditions of competition' that prevail in an economy. Although these types of data are not policy-specific, they could be used for monitoring, reporting and multilateral surveillance purposes, and allow cross-country comparisons and the establishment of 'benchmarks' against which changes in a given country over time could be measured.