OECD, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development currently includes 30 member states. As an OECD member, Finland actively participates in the work of its various committees. In the OECD Competition Committee, Finland is represented by the FCCA.
The Competition Committee comes together three times a year, and it has two separate sub-committees. One, Working Party No. 2 on Competition and Regulation (WP2) specialises in the connection between competition policy and regulation, and the other, Working Party No. 3 on Enforcement and Co-operation (WP3) specialises on mergers and cartel issues.
The main working method of the Competition Committee and the working groups is a so-called Roundtable discussion in which pre-selected topics of competition law or economics are discussed on the basis of previously delivered memorandums.
Almost invariably, world’s leading experts of economics of competition and law and representatives of the economy participate in the Roundtable meetings in addition to member state representatives. Finnish companies have also participated the meetings. All the memorandums related to the Roundtable discussions are later published on the OECD webpages.
The Competition Committee prepares various recommendations related to competition for the OECD’s approval. For example in 2005, the organisation published Best Practices for the Formal Exchange of Information Between Competition Authorities in Hard Core Investigations. The last published memorandum, the Competition Assessment Toolkit, concerns the assessment of competition issues when drafting sectoral regulation.
The Competition Committee also arranges the Global Forum on Competition event each year, which was created to promote discussion between the OECD countries and non-OECD countries. This event is also participated by e.g. China and India. Some of the non-OECD countries (e.g. Brazil and Russia) participate directly in the work of the Competition Committee with an observer status.
The Competition committee is currently chaired by Professor of Economics, member of the Supreme Court of France, Mr Frédéric Jenny. The chairs of the working groups are the Italian Professor Alberto Heimler (WP2) and Assistant Attorney General of the US Ministry of Justice Christine A. Varney(WP3).
The role of the Economic Committee in competition policy
In addition to the Competition Committee, competition issues also come up in some other OECD Committees. Perhaps the most important of these is the Economic Committee, which also takes a stand to possible deficiencies in competition policy when evaluating the member states' economic policies. The latest report of the Economic Committee on Finland was published in April 2012.
last modified 12/28/2012