With our partners the Asian Development Bank and the Philippines Competition Commission the OECD/KPC provided a Competition Economics 24 hour long mini-course on Mergers and Abuse of Dominance with two world-class professors of competition economics: Prof. Massimo Motta and Prof. Chiara Fumagalli. This comprised one workshop on Merger Economics and another on Abuse of Dominance Economics. This mini-course was meant for economics and non-economists. More than 100 participants from ASEAN competition authorities took part in the workshops.

All over the world there are increasing concerns of growing industrial concentration and market power by firms, and several voices have been calling for antitrust authorities to be stricter when they vet mergers, whereas others defend the current standards. The merger workshop gave participants a thorough understanding of the competition economics of merger control, through the analysis of established and new economic theories on mergers, insights on the relevant empirical methods, and discussions on recent high-profile merger cases.

Abuse of dominance is one of the most debated area in competition policy. Often the difference between a behaviour that is efficient or anti-competitive can be difficult to discern and that is where the economic analysis can play a role. The abuse of dominance workshop provided the participants with a thorough understanding of the most recent economic theories of abuse of dominance, help them apply these concepts in practice, and review actual cases in the light of an economic approach.

In particular, the discussions focused on:

1. The established and recent economic theories of abuse and merger through a largely non-formal exposition also accessible to non-economists.

2. The distinguishing economic features of possible types of abuse, including price and non-price conduct.

3. The possible theories of harm in abuse and merger cases.

4. The core elements of an effects-based approach for the assessment of unilateral conduct.

5. The main traits of the relevant empirical methods used in merger control.

6. Some of the important recent merger and abuse cases in various sectors.