Abstract:
Abstract
It is now a common understanding that trade competition regime is very important to bring economic
efficiency, consumer welfare, innovation, development and growth. Accordingly, Ethiopia reinstated
the competition regime after 1991 up on the end of command economy that was practiced for 17
years. Currently, the country’s policy documents and competition legislations manifest its
commitment towards free market economy despite the fact that the development of competition law
and enforcement is at its infant stage.
Low level of development of competition regime is attributed to absence of competition culture and
weak competition enforcement by authority as well as deficient legal frame work. Moreover, the
Ethiopian market is characterized by extensive government intervention in the market without sound
justifications through the means of regulatory and administrative measures under taken by agencies
at all level of government.
Hence, it is vital to intervene in the process in order to protect the market from anticompetitive
practices resulted from uncompetitive market behaviour and structure. As the roots of these problems
are government induced policies and laws as well as private motivated practices the usual means of
addressing this objective is competition advocacy; to shape the behaviour of government regulation
and private practices towards competitive friendly measures and behaviours.
In line with this argument, this study seeks to examine, place of competition advocacy in Ethiopia’s
competition legal framework and the trade competition and consumer protection authority’s
commitment towards this function in the country within the existed legal framework. More
specifically, the appropriateness of organizational set up of the competition authority in discharging
the function and better organizational and legal set up to discharge competition advocacy in
Ethiopia is analyzed.
Therefore, the study concludes that the Ethiopian competition legal frame work is not line with the
proper function of competition advocacy specially in respect of empowering the competition
authority to persuade regulatory agencies to consider values of competition in their actions.
Moreover, the paper argues that the authority should reinforce its practice of advocacy in both areas
of public awareness and counseling regulatory organs.