OREANDA-NEWS.  September 18, 2012. A plenary session on “Increasing Efficiency of Antimonopoly Supervision in a Globalised Economy” took place at the opening of FAS Training Centre in Kazan. One of the speakers was the Chairman of OECD Competition Committee, Frederic Jenny, reported the press-centre of FAS Russia. 

First of all, he expressed his gratitude to the Head of the Antimonopoly Service and highlighted a special significance of establishing the Training Centre.

“Today we are happy to be directly engaged in this landmark event for all antimonopoly bodies. General activities of the Centre are aimed at supporting the dialogue between experts in the field of antimonopoly law, and advancing the best practices and competition as such”, pointed out Frederic Jenny.

The Chairman of OECD Competition Committee focused his speech on establishing and unifying competition culture. In any country developing competition culture is a complex and long process. Nevertheless, undertaking this process is necessary if the countries are to reap the benefits of open and competitive market systems.

The first step is developing a unified competition law. In many countries the enforcement of the law is unsatisfactory due to a faulty institutional design of competition authority, lack of experience of competition law enforcers or insufficient resources. Effective enforcement of the law, however, is nor a sufficient condition to create a competitive market system.

Ex-ante compliance with the law by economic actors is even more important than ex-post elimination of anticompetitive behaviors by the competition authority.

The degree of ex-ante compliance depends on a number of factors: knowledge of the law, deterrence mechanisms, understanding of the value of competitive markets, social responsibility of firms, rationality of business decisions, etc.

Summing up, the Chairman of OECD Competition Committee wished the officers of the Training Centre and all his colleagues every success in the ambitious initiative and productive cooperation for the purposes of strengthening and generalizing already existing practices.