Competition authorities have regularly expressed desires to be leaders in their field. Such expressions range from one-off comments made in speeches to being embedded in strategic plans. This project seeks to shed light on ambitions of competition authorities to lead their peers on competition policy matters. While authorities’ annual work or prioritization plans are often a response to more immediate needs of the economy within an authority’s jurisdiction, leadership ambitions provide a glimpse into where an authority considers it has strengths that will inspire or influence others.
What this project seeks to achieve, based on an assessment of competition authorities’ leadership ambitions and a survey of practitioners, is to provide input from those who are subject to competition policy. In other words, the question posed is whether these leadership ambitions are meaningful from that constituency’s perspective. Ideally, in a well-functioning competition regime, competition authorities should be able to achieve their objectives following best practices while meeting the legitimate needs of their users. Given the notable shifts in approaches to competition policy in 2025, such as the European Commission’s Competitiveness Compass or the U.S.’s “America First Antitrust”, these questions are increasingly significant...