Exporting Knowledge Through Technical Assistance And Capacity Building

With a significant increase in the number of countries with antitrust laws, technical assistance (TA) to improve the capacity of antitrust agencies has become a key priority for international antitrust aid efforts. Donors have assigned a significant amount of time and financial resources to TA to raise the capacity and effectiveness of younger agencies. However, quantitative analysis of the impact of this TA remains limited at best. In this article, we focus on what appears to be a particularly important part of TA and capacity building—the use of long-term advisors (LTAs) and short-term interventions (STIs). In a year-long project, the International Competition Network surveyed its member antitrust agencies on antitrust TA. The questionnaire contained over 1,000 questions on various aspects of TA. We provide an analysis of the data using formal modeling. The most important findings from the model relate to two structural features of recipient antitrust agencies. First, recipient agencies absorb LTA and STI services best when the agency head has a rank of minister or higher and when agencies have prosecutorial discretion. At the heart of this agency feature is the relative power position of the agency in the recipient country's domestic political and economic structure. Those agencies with a strong power base seem well positioned to receive the current formatted TA involving LTAs and STIs. Second, bilateral donor relationships did remarkably better than multilateral relationships in helping the agencies with their strategic mission.