Co-Sponsors: CUTS International, Action for Economic Reforms
This forum was aimed to provide a venue to discuss the challenges that the Philippines faces in crafting competition law and implementing competition reforms. Currently, the Philippines is one of the few remaining countries in Southeast Asia without a comprehensive competition law. Since the early 1980s, the Philippine legislature has attempted to pass this law but without much success.
On June 9, 2011, Malacanang issued Executive Order 45 designating the Department of Justice as our Competition Office mandated to investigate all cases violating competition law and prosecute violators; enforce competition policy and competition law; and supervise competition, among others. All these tasks represent enormous challenges to a very young Competition Office.
In setting the ways forward, the Forum aimed to address the following: Given our existing economic framework and legal and regulatory systems for enforcing competition, what are the competition measures that we need to prioritize in order to effectively protect the Filipino consumers and the overall competition process? How do we build our competition office in the light of constraints such as lack of competition culture, weak consumer groups, inadequacies of the courts in resolving business disputes particularly competition cases (delays in processing cases, corruption) as well as political/sectoral opposition to economic reforms? Given that the institutional ingredients necessary to make ambitious competition systems feasible in developed countries hardly exist in a developing country setting like ours and will take time to build, what should be our implementation strategy?
DOWNLOADS
This forum was aimed to provide a venue to discuss the challenges that the Philippines faces in crafting competition law and implementing competition reforms. Currently, the Philippines is one of the few remaining countries in Southeast Asia without a comprehensive competition law. Since the early 1980s, the Philippine legislature has attempted to pass this law but without much success.
On June 9, 2011, Malacanang issued Executive Order 45 designating the Department of Justice as our Competition Office mandated to investigate all cases violating competition law and prosecute violators; enforce competition policy and competition law; and supervise competition, among others. All these tasks represent enormous challenges to a very young Competition Office.
In setting the ways forward, the Forum aimed to address the following: Given our existing economic framework and legal and regulatory systems for enforcing competition, what are the competition measures that we need to prioritize in order to effectively protect the Filipino consumers and the overall competition process? How do we build our competition office in the light of constraints such as lack of competition culture, weak consumer groups, inadequacies of the courts in resolving business disputes particularly competition cases (delays in processing cases, corruption) as well as political/sectoral opposition to economic reforms? Given that the institutional ingredients necessary to make ambitious competition systems feasible in developed countries hardly exist in a developing country setting like ours and will take time to build, what should be our implementation strategy?
DOWNLOADS
- Evolution of Competition Policy and Law (Presentation by Udai S Mehta, Associate Director, CUTS International)
- Competition Policy Experience of the Philippines (Presentation by Rafaelita M. Aldaba, Vice President, PIDS)
- Crafting Competition Law (Presentation by Geronimo L. Sy, Assistant Secretary, Department of Justice)
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