Building Landmarks, Smoothing Out Markets (An Enhanced Competition Framework in Romania)

Romania identified competition as key to its effective economic development and is positioning the Competition Council to become more visible and effective. Improving Romania’s competitive environment will attract new firms, weed out inefficient ones, and enhance growth potential. An effective competition policy leads to success in the areas of Romania's domestic market efficiency, economic growth and European market integration. Following a comprehensive functional review of the Romanian Competition Council carried out by the World Bank in 2010, weaknesses, needs and priorities were identified. This book presents the results of the World Bank’s Advisory Services which were designed to provide solutions in the identified reform areas during 2012-2015. The Advisory Services provided an innovative delivery model that involved integrated expertise to (i) review the legal and regulatory framework for competition; (ii) offer advocacy support to streamline competition policy principles with other governmental policies and strengthen intergovernmental relations, especially with sectoral regulators (electricity and telecommunication) and the prosecutor's office; (iii) state-of-the-art capacity building to strengthen the Council’s staff’s technical knowledge; and (iv) optimize internal procedures to allow for improvements in institutional functioning using Enterprise Architecture methodology, which provided an in-depth institutional assessment and the development of a target business and information technology architecture. The Competition Council has started to apply some of the upgraded regulatory instruments. These, combined with the analytical skills in antitrust law and economics acquired with the World Bank support, have been already applied in recent antitrust cases, market inquiries meant to identify competition constraints in sectors that have great importance for consumers and infrastructure projects with state aid elements.