Whilst the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is not a regulator, it provides a forum in which governments can work together, share experiences and seek solutions to common problems. Drawing on their research, they recommend policies designed to improve the quality of people’s lives.
For this reason we are delighted to introduce John Davies, Head of Competition Division, OECD to our blog; thus, this month, we move away from our typical focus on a regulator or in-house counsel. John leads the OECD’s work on competition law and policy, to position the Competition Committee and the OECD, as the leading source of analysis, advice and cross-country cooperation on these issues.
Q. John, you’ve had quite a varied career within the field of competition policy. Do you find you use the experiences from your previous jobs in the work at the OECD?
A. Yes. I think one of the great things about this policy area – as I often enthuse to young economists or lawyers thinking about their career options – is that you can move around and keep on building your expertise. People can often go back and forth between the private sector, public sector and academia. This has been the case in the USA for a long time, but other countries’ public sectors are more open to it than they were.
I started in private practice, spending ten years as a consulting economist in London, working for various firms. Then I went to the UK Competition Commission – now merged into the CMA of course – into the economics team, where I later became Chief Economist. Then I made a move to Mauritius for two years, to set up the new competition agency there: the Competition Commission of Mauritius, and lead it through its first year of operations. It was when I was in Mauritius that I applied for this job at the OECD and I felt that the combination I brought of private and public sector experience, of economic analysis and enforcement, of working in an experienced agency and a new one in a developing country – all that seemed to give me quite a lot of breadth in my experience, to take on what is a very broad role here at the OECD. The selection panel seemed to agree, so here I am.
Q. So what is that role? Not all of our readers will be familiar with the OECD’s work in competition.
A. The OECD is an intergovernmental organisation, which exists to help promote good policy – especially economic policy but increasingly these days right across governments’ responsibilities. It carries out research and it brings together officials and experts from governments across the world to share experiences and agree on common standards when they can. Our work in competition policy is part of that. People from competition agencies from our 34 member countries and 17 other participants get together in Paris twice a year for a week discussing and debating current topics in competition. These ‘roundtable’ topics might be very broad – market definition, for example – or more specific like our recent discussion of the treatment of non-notified and consummated mergers. My team prepares think-piece papers for that discussion and we try to get academic or other experts, including lawyers and economists from the private sector. Once a year we hold our “Global Forum”, which is similar but on a larger scale with about a hundred countries. We carry out special projects sometimes for specific countries – lately we have been working a lot in Greece on pro-competitive policy reform – and we also do a lot of capacity building work, especially through our centres in Budapest and Seoul. So it’s very varied.
Q. What are the main issues you are looking at right now?
We always have a very wide range – never more than about 10% of my budget on any one topic, I would say. At our next meeting in June, for example, we’ll be covering non-competition objectives in competition law, rebates, disruptive innovation in legal services, the ‘nexus’ in merger control and more. Longer-term, OECD is going to be working a lot on “innovation and the digital economy” over the next few years and also on “market studies” which we think are increasingly important but often do not get as much attention as enforcement. We are working a lot in Mexico just now, on assessing anti-competitive regulation and also on helping Mexican institutions design and run their procurement to make it harder for bidders to act collusively. Oh –and we are about to launch a Chinese-language compilation of summaries of all our roundtable discussions over the last five years!
Q. Most of your work is for governments. What is the value of it for private practitioners and can they get involved?
A. The result of all of our roundtable discussions is a free publication. Whether it’s a topic in competition law, or a discussion of competition in a sector, we put together the papers my team wrote, along with papers by external experts who came to the discussion and the submissions by all of the countries who took part – along with a summary, which is just as well because the publication is often huge! I think that’s a great resource for practitioners – and I have thought that since long before I joined the OECD myself. You can very quickly see a summary of the issues and the state of the policy debate, by reading the initial papers, then if you want to drill down into what individual competition agencies from different countries have said and done about it, you can do that. It’s a good way to start thinking about a prospective case. They are all here.
We often invite lawyers and economists in private practice to our discussions as experts, and they can also participate of their own accord through an organisation called BIAC. If you want to take part in the OECD discussions, contact them at here.
A. And now you are moving on?
Q. Yes, after five years at OECD I have decided to return to the private sector, so I will be joining the London office of Compass Lexecon, the economics consultancy firm. I have had a great time here, but I feel like I have done it long enough and I miss the cut and thrust of casework. I am sure I will stay in touch with the OECD, though, and the wider competition world – including in developing countries.
