On 22 October 2009, the OECD Council adopted a Recommendation that calls for governments to identify existing or proposed public policies that unduly restrict competition and to revise them by adopting more pro-competitive alternatives.

The Recommendation calls for governments to establish institutional mechanisms for undertaking such reviews. A number of approaches to competition assessment are possible. The OECD's Competition Assessment Toolkit outlines one approach.  

Download the text of the Recommendation

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Rationale for the Recommendation

Increased competition contributes to higher economic productivity and growth. In many jurisdictions, however, laws, regulations or other government-imposed barriers unduly restrain market activities. One important step to eliminate these restraints is “competition assessment”, that is, the evaluation of policies to find those unnecessarily restricting competition in order to develop alternative policies that achieve the same objectives, with lesser harm to competition.

Many jurisdictions have recently created guidance for reviewing competitive effects of regulations and developing an institutional mechanism for spreading this guidance. This OECD Recommendation encourages further governmental efforts to reduce unduly restrictive regulations and promote beneficial market activity.

Scope of the Recommendation

The recommendation applies to OECD member countries. Other economies are welcome to associate themselves to the recommendation. The scope of policies covered by the recommendation includes government regulations, rules and legislation.

2014 Implementation Report and the revision of the OECD Competition Assessment Toolkit

In 2014, the OECD carried out a first review of OECD member countries experiences with the application of the 2009 Recommendation on competition assessment. The resulting implementation report, Experiences with Competition Assessment 2014, describes the assessment processes currently in use as well as specific examples of competition assessments in different jurisdictions. The review also concluded that the OECD Competition Assessessment Toolkit could be expanded. A third volume of the toolkit together with a revision of its two previous volumes were released in  2015. 

In addition, in 2019, the Toolkit was revised in light of the changes brought about by the digitalisation.

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The OECD Competition Assessment Toolkit was designed to help governments eliminate barriers to competition through a method that identifies unnecessary restraints on market activities and develops alternative, less restrictive measures that still achieve government policy objectives.

Romania, Greece, Mexico, Portugal, Tunisia, Iceland and a number of South-East Asian countries have already being using the toolkit to assess competition-distorting rules in targeted sectors of their economies.

Read more about their experiences:

Greece 

Mexico 

Romania 

Portugal 

Tunisia 

ASEAN 

Download: English • Français‌ 

The toolkit consists of three volumes and the first two volumes are available for download in 17 languages. 

See also:

Other OECD Recommendations on Competition Law and Policy

More OECD work on Competition