COMPAL: what type of deliverables on competition law and policy?

Summary

More than 150 delegates from developed and developing countries participated in the side event on competition policy, which was co-organized by UNCTAD and the Swiss Government. The event presented UNCTAD work on capacity-building in the area of competition law and policy. Compal was the focus of this event.

The side event provided an opportunity for UNCTAD, donors, beneficiary countries and other institutions to discuss the Compal programme, review success stories and the lessons learned, and explore areas for replication in other regions and in interested countries. The discussions also provided a constructive exchange of views on how to identify new and innovative ways of delivering capacity-building to an increasing number of interested countries and regional groupings given the limited resources available to UNCTAD.

Switzerland and other potential donors (the United Kingdom, Norway and Germany) praised the success of the Compal programme in the Latin American region and supported the proposal to replicate this successful programme in other regions.

Development partners and beneficiary countries expressed the need to consolidate projects and initiate a process for thematic clustering for UNCTAD technical assistance, as called for by UNCTAD's Trade and Development Board. To that end, it was felt that a cluster should be able to streamline capacity-building on cost-effective technical assistance, including through identifying new and innovative methods of creating synergies between UNCTAD, partners and beneficiaries.

In addition, consultations during this event led to the following recommendations:

• UNCTAD should identify needs of African countries in the areas of competition and consumer protection, and provide assistance to Uganda, Rwanda, the West African Monetary Union and the Economic Community of West African States.
• UNCTAD should improve its communication strategy in order to better disseminate the Compal programme as well as other work on competition policy in different countries and regions.
• UNCTAD should integrate success stories from Compal with other programmes, including Empretec, and work on investment. It should also adopt a holistic approach to integrate competition as a cross-cutting issue.
• UNCTAD should provide detailed information on future activities so that member States could consider their participation in the replication of Compal.