Competition Law and Policy in South Africa

Michael Wise

OECD Journal: Competition Law and Policy, 2004, vol. 5, issue 4, 7-69

Abstract: One of the elements of South Africa’s peaceful revolution over the last decade was reform of its competition policy institutions. The previous system had supported the previous economic system, characterised by autarky, protection, government direction, and high concentration. The new system promised to use competition policy to correct the faults of the old system and to promote policy goals of employment and empowerment. South Africa aspires to a modern competition policy regime, to deal with the well-resourced sophistication of much of the South African economy. Its new institutions, whose novelty responds in large part to the post-1994 imperative for fundamental restructuring of government institutions, have shown a capacity to deal confidently with complex structural issues in deciding dozens of merger cases. A legalistic business and government culture has challenged these new bodies to prove their competence and tested their jurisdiction. Now that the merger review process has been established, more attention should be paid to non-merger matters and probably to advocacy as well. Resources are stretched, and there is a critical need to improve the depth and strengthen the capacity of the professional staff. Maintaining consistent competition policy in regulated sectors will requiring reinforcing the relationships with sectoral regulators ...

Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1787/clp-v5-art14-en (text/html)
Full text available to READ online. PDF download available to OECD iLibrary subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oec:dafkaa:5lmqcr2jcxkf

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in OECD Journal: Competition Law and Policy from OECD Publishing Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().